


I Can Feel Again

by Ink_Dancer



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: #SPOILERS FOR CA:TWS AND AOS, #bucky feels, #clintasha, #kinda drabble, #like kate bishop the female hawkeye, #lots of marvel characters, #may suck a little cuz character writing probs, #not really trigger warning but just incase, #pepperony, #stucky duh, #this is gonna be fun, #yeah be aware of PTSD and stuff, M/M, officially complete
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-09
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 03:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 29,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1589660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ink_Dancer/pseuds/Ink_Dancer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post CA:TWS, Steve follows Bucky around until Bucky turns the tables on him one night. The avengers and some major time-lapse Bucky-healing ensue, leading to drabbly later stuff. SPOILER ALERTS for both CA:TWS and AOS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Bucky flinched hard at the pictures of himself, as always.

Walking past a memorial to himself was pretty surreal. 

He could usually withstand it, though. As always, he had been here for nearly the whole day. It had been nearly three weeks since the incident when Captain -- _Steve_ \-- had awoken most of his memories on the helicarrier. It probably hadn’t been smart to stay in Washington DC, but Bucky was torn up at the thought of being far away from Captai -- _Steve_ \-- and the Smithsonian exhibit. Visitng the exhibit helped a lot, because for some odd reason, staring at himself and especially staring at Capta -- _Steve_ \-- awoke a lot of his memories, although very patchily. He couldn’t always connect them with the emotions that went with them, and most of it was hazy and straining to think about.

Shoving his hands deep into his pockets, Bucky bit his lip hard as he strode down the sidewalk in the cooling air. He’d found an apartment nobody was using not far from the museum, although it was up for rent and he was worried someone would move in. 

Kicking at a rock savagely, he froze as the back of his neck tingled. Senses that he had developed as the Winter Soldier, _sixth_ senses, stood on end and screeched at him on high alert. 

_Someone’s following me_.

It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed, a muscly, tall guy with a baseball cap pulled low over his face, always. Bucky’s trained eye never found any weapons on him, but being followed was getting on his now-fragile nerves. 

With a low growl, he looped around, jumping up a tree faster than the eye could see and clinging on with his metal arm, which glinted in the fading sunlight.

He heard a disappointed noise below him as the man turned and began to walk quickly. 

Waiting just a moment, Bucky dropped silently and flitted from tree to tree, rolling and throwing himself flat once, cursing as the guy sensed him. Luckily, he didn’t see him.

The tall guy began whistling tunelessly, and before long, reached an apartment building.

Bucky went rigid as he saw it, panic rising in his chest.

 

_Four shots, at least, through the wall where he knew the target was._

_Raising his gun, he turned and began sprinting down the building, mentally cursing in Russian as he heard the loud footsteps of someone pursuing._

_Diving off the higher roof and rolling up to run again, he heard the whistling of metal behind him. Turning swiftly, he caught the painted shield with his metal arm as if it was a frisbee before throwing it back hard enough to slide his pursuer back a few steps._

I know him _, he thought, then shook his head angrily as he turned, diving from the building while the man was distracted._ I don’t know anybody _, he thought fiercely. Then, less fiercely:_ I don’t even know my name.

 

Bucky swallowed hard. A few weeks ago, he’d murdered Fury through those walls. He’d nearly been caught. But it hadn’t been until later that week when they’d wiped him yet again.

Shivering, he wiped his hand on his jeans, palming a knife as he did so. Grimly, he cracked his neck and scaled the building from the outside, landing in front of the window that had illuminated a moment ago before flaring out. Peering in, Bucky saw a mound in a pile of blankets, heard a sigh of breath with his enhanced hearing.

Jumping, Bucky navigated to the door, climbing the stairs. Trying to do good by his new self meant no window-entries.

Still, he shoved a pick into the lock and jiggled the tip, smiling ferociously as a click sounded when the tumblers slid into place. Sliding the door open, he slipped carefully inside.

Finding the bedroom was easy. Following the snuffling sounds of sleep-breathing, Bucky walked purposefully but quietly down the hall, walking straight in.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, overcome with uncertainty. Should he? It wasn’t like the guy was doing any harm. The assassin almost smiled at a shock of blonde hair protruding from the blankets, they reminded him of Cap -- _Steve’s_. 

Diving forward suddenly, Bucky landed with his knees on either side of the man’s legs and pressed his cold, metal hand to the man’s shoulder. There was a grunt beneath him, and Bucky raised the knife just slightly -- not planning to use it, just as a subtle threat.

Well, _subtle_ wasn’t really the word.

The man rolled over, his face becoming visible in the dim light. His blue eyes widened, seeing Bucky, and he opened his mouth to speak, but Bucky cut him off, growling, “Why are you following me? _Stop_ following me.”

“You’re one to talk about following,” came the rather lazy reply, and Bucky went completely still again.

He cursed in Russian, dropping the knife, nearly diving backwards.

“Bucky,” said the voice under him. The light clicked on as the man sat up, and Bucky couldn’t suppress the urge to swallow hard as he saw a _very_ shirtless Steve Rogers in front of him. “Buck,” he said again, reaching out to grab Bucky’s shoulders.

The assassin went to shove himself away, but was stopped by a strong hand on his flesh arm. “Steve,” was all he said. Having no idea what to do, he simply shoved his hair back out of his face and waited.

“Do you remember?” asked Steve intensely, leaning foward.

Bucky nodded. “A little.” This was a little bit of a lie -- he remembered very little, but he remembered enough to know that Steve was someone he could trust. With everything. 

Steve just stared at him.

Bucky became hyper-aware of the fact that he was straddling the man who was his best friend, and also happened to have been his lover for awhile back before either of them had frozen. This revelation made him swallow harder than ever before as he felt blood rushing southward, leaving him dizzy. That was yet another fun fact he had remembered, many memories coming flooding back that made his ears turn slightly red. “Um,” he tried. “I remember a little now... That exhibit in the Smithsonian helps a lot, and you helped the most, to be honest, but...” He trailed off with a shrug before continuing, deciding to tell Steve all of it. “I’m having a hard time connecting memories with emotions, if you know what I mean, although some things are easier than others.” He felt his ears turned a little red again, and he thought he saw Steve flash a very quick grin. Was that a tell of his?

“Well. This was kind of...sudden,” Steve remarked, his gaze flicking to his own legs, which Bucky still sat on. The assassin made as if to move again, but again Steve’s hand stopped him.

Bucky shrugged. “Thought you were...” he cleared his throat, “some enemy I’d picked up...” He waved his hand vaguely, but Steve understood immediately.

“Well, I’m not. Satisfied? I just wanted to see how you were doing.” Steve’s thumb rubbed a little reassuring circle on Bucky’s shoulder, and the brunette had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from making a noise. 

“How did you know where I was?” he asked, successfully distracting himself. 

“SHIELD is keeping some tabs on you. Although, it’s kind off in chaos -- it was mostly Natasha’s doing. They still haven’t totally flushed out HYDRA, and it’s for certain that many agents still have questionable alliances,” explained Steve. “They’re fairly preoccupied, but Fury asked Natasha to --”

Bucky sat up straight, all of his senses tingling. _“Fury?!”_

“Oh.” For a moment, Steve looked apprehensive, as if he was sharing a secret. The look he was giving him struck Bucky like a hammerblow, but he shoved the feeling back as Steve continued, “Yeah. Fury survived, he’s somewhere in Europe, I dunno. He’s totally off-grid, everyone thinks he’s dead because --”

“Because I shot him,” muttered Bucky, finally pulling himself off of Steve. 

“Buck, nobody blames you,” Steve said quietly.

“That’s a lie,” snarled Bucky in reply. “ _You_ may not, but that could be a lie, too.” He was curling in on himself, he could feel it, but he didn’t care. “I’m scared of going out in public, Steve, in case someone recognizes me. I don’t think -- I don’t think I could deal with people looking at me like that again.” _Especially you_ , he wanted to say, but the words stuck in his throat, particularly because that look was terrifyingly similar to the look Steve had given him while debating whether to tell him about Fury. “Everybody at your ridiculous SHIELD organization hates me, except maybe your little friends, Natasha and the bird guy.” That was the most he’d said at one time in a very long time.

Bucky’s throat nearly closed at the thought of Natasha Romanoff, whom he had mentored in Russia when he had belonged to the Russians, no longer Soviets, but _always_ HYDRA, when he had been under and barely able to be more than a cold, killing machine. He feared that when she had known him as Yasha, memories of which time were so very fuzzy for him, he had harmed her, hurt her, forced her to become something she was not. 

“His name is Sam Wilson,” Steve said calmly, answering Bucky’s previous comments. “And SHIELD is in utter chaos, Bucky.”

The assassin frowned. “Chaos?”

“HYDRA was apparently behind everything, including what happened to you.” Once again, Steve rubbed a circle in Bucky’s shoulder. “Their secret bases everywhere are in jeopardy. The Triskelion was the first of many to be attacked. It’s secure now. There are literally four confirmed secure bases, besides the many secret ones.”

Bucky did not care about SHIELD very much at that point, other than the knowledge that he had sparked this, he was the secret weapon, the attack dog that HYDRA would use to pick off enemies, to inspire more chaos in the world. Steve, however, clearly cared what happened to SHIELD, and as near as Bucky could tell or remember, he had friends associated with the agency.

Bucky suddenly became very still, and he sensed Steve’s worry. In the past few weeks, he had become nearly recovered, almost himself again. But every once in awhile, he would have a little relapse, sinking back into who and what he had been for the first few days after the helicarrier incident -- numb and tired, remembering in patches, stumbling around, not opening his mouth to speak, his movements jerky and stiff as he made sure he did not attack random people, fearful of himself. He didn’t say a word, didn’t trust himself, just drifted in silence and refused to acknowledge more than the dull ache of things long forgotten and too-swiftly remembered.

He half-wished that Steve had been there during those long nights when he continually woke up, absolutely positive that he was going to be on the table again, subject to whatever tortures the Red Room had for him. When he found himself thrashing on the floor of the apartment, moonlight shining in, he forced himself to take many long, shaky breaths and told himself that it was just a dream, a flashback, that it was over now. He would pull himself up off the floor and lean against the wall, shivering but not moving much, just huddled and trying to breathe and forget and remember at the same time, until dawn would shine in and he would force himself up to get to the Smithsonian.

It happened every night, and there were now dark, almost violet circles under Bucky’s hazel eyes, but he preferred to sit and be awake than dream about what had happened to him.

Now, his vision sort of tunneled. All he felt was a dull numbness, surrounding him and pressing in on him. Little hazy images of things seeped through -- the sensation of Steve waving a hand in front of his face, hearing as if through deep water Steve say his name a few times. 

Nothing pierced the veil of fog around him, and he had the sensation of falling, falling, spiraling down further and further as exhaustion took a hold of the -- not “attack”, really -- and used it to make him sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve informs the team that Bucky's coming to the Tower.

Steve tapped Bucky’s shoulder, waved his hand in front of his face. He had seen Bucky do this over the several weeks of watching him. He had been in a sort of stupor, numb and dully watching the world around him. The exhibit had thawed him immensely, but what Steve had seen was that he would sometimes fall into a daze, dissociating from the world in the middle of something. He would zone out and completely detach and wouldn’t respond to anything.

Steve called his name a couple times, but the assassin knelt there like a living statue, breathing, his eyes so far away. With a sigh, Steve stood and slipped an arm under Bucky’s knees, another under his shoulders, before hoisting his old boyfriend up and then laying him on the bed ever so carefully. Hearing a ping from behind him on the laptop Tony had given him to keep in touch constantly, and that noise meant that one of the Avengers was contacting him.

With a helpless glance at the former Winter Soldier, laying almost completely still on his bed, now asleep, Steve turned and grabbed the laptop, bringing it in and settling in a chair to watch him sleep.

Opening it, he logged in and was greeted by an image of Tony, Bruce, and Clint standing in Stark’s penthouse. “Cap!” yelled Tony excitedly. Pepper, next to him, winced at his loud voice.

“Shh!” snapped Steve, holding a finger to his lips.

“What’s wrong?” asked Bruce. “We’ve been trying to contact you for days, where have you been?”

Steve threw his head back with a laugh. “I found an old friend.”

Clint stiffened, his interest piqued. “What about Natasha? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. The government’s released her, and they’ve told Hill that if we don’t secure every SHIELD base in the next six weeks, Ellis is going to give the order for a nuclear strike to all bases that aren’t secure.”

Tony swore, rubbing his chin. “You need to get here tomorrow, Steve. You, Nat, and that Falcon guy of yours. We’ll need his help.”

Steve winced, rubbing the back of his neck. “Um. I have a question.”

The four watched him without moving.

“I found -- I found an old friend,” Steve repeated. “James Buchanan Barnes, Bucky. The Winter Soldier, although he isn’t anymore.” The Avengers who stood in the Tower were tense suddenly, listening. “I just want to bring him along.”

“No,” vetoed Tony immediately. “He could hurt someone.”

“No!” yelped Steve desperately. “I can’t leave him here -- he’s barely even unstable anymore. He -- I feel like I can help him. He needs me, and he is an incredible fighter. He’s be an asset, really.”

Pepper agreed immediately, and both Clint and Bruce decided to support it as well. Tony looked unhappy, but he grunted, “Alright. Steve, bring him, too, but he needs to stay behind when we go on missions.”

“I don’t think --” Steve began.

He was interrupted by a roughly sleepy voice from the bed. “’S’all right, Steve, ‘ll be fine.”

Steve looked over the laptop at him, his eyes glazed a little with sleep, but not with dissociation. A tiny smile twisted Bucky’s mouth, an expression that changed his whole face. “You sure, Buck?” asked Steve quietly.

A small nod. “Promise.”

After another brief hesitation, Steve nodded decisively. “Fine. See you tomorrow, guys,” he told the computer. The others just grunted, although Bruce quietly murmured a proper goodbye, and the screen went dark.

“They don’t trust me yet,” Bucky mused quietly as Steve closed the laptop. “But that’s okay. They’ve never even met me.” Nodding decisively just as Steve had a moment before, the assassin added as he drifted back into sleep: “I’ll make ‘em trust me.”

Steve smiled at the man, now apparently sleeping again. Stretching, he yawned and rubbed his face, curling on the chair, fully intending to sleep there.

Then to his surprise, he heard Bucky’s tired voice, “You know, I don’t remember a lot. But I do remember that we were comfortable sharing beds.”

Steve, smiling, stood and walked over, laying down next to Bucky. “You sure?”

A grunt as the assassin shifted was his only reply for a moment before Bucky said, “Steve. I’m -- I’m okay, right now. And I think...” he paused as he swallowed, “...I think that this’ll help. Being near you again.”

Steve didn’t get anymore words from him, but he understood: Bucky felt that he was mostly okay again. Memories, fairly stable, most of the recovery stemming from the Smithsonian and Steve’s own help on the helicarrier. But Steve wasn’t sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, a lot of the Cap perspectives will be pretty short.  
> A couple more things to add about this:  
> -After a certain point, chapters are going to get a little...drabbly. There will be less plot, more ideas and headcanons and such. MOST OF THESE HEADCANONS ARE NOT JUST MINE. A lot of them were inspired by the Tumblr "imaginebucky," which is a beautiful blog and inspires a lot of my stucky/bucky feels and if you're not following them FOLLOW THEM NOW.  
> -I plan to add another two stucky fics: one with a fem!bucky and another that's a mutant OC joining the Avengers, which will be fun. I'm using some of the same general ideas, more specific ideas will be split between the three. (Y'see, I have this huge LIST of stucky and bucky headcanons and i have to decide which of the three fics to give them to and ARGH)
> 
> So, yeah! That's all for now -- hope you enjoyed! Those two other fics won't be up for AWHILE. This one will continued to updated whenever I have time.


	3. Chapter 3

Bucky grunted and sat up. The best sleep in weeks, probably because he had been so tired, had been his that night. Then he looked to his left and saw Steve, still slumbering, and a smile flickered across the assassin’s face. That was probably the main reason he had slept so well. 

A moment later, Steve stirred and rolled over, sitting up. “Morning,” he said quietly. “Hungry?”

Bucky shook his head wordlessly.

Steve nodded. “Me neither. Let’s go get Tash and Sam.”

The two took turns in the shower, Bucky picking up without question a pair of jeans and a hoodie that Steve had dropped in the bathroom for him. He frowned as he heard a little clink. He looked at the tile floor, and saw a pair of dog tags lying rather forlornly on the floor.

Bucky crouched, picking them up and slowly standing, running the length of chain over his fingers. _Barnes_ , one of them said. The other had a serial number (32557) that he remembered reciting over and over like it was a string of code for his lost memories as he crouched in the dark and cold, forgetting what he wanted to remember. 

They were his dog tags from the war.

He’d thought Zola had taken them from him -- he guessed Steve had. He pulled the tags over his head, feeling them settle against his chest in a ridiculously comforting way.

He knew he was never taking them off again.

They got out of the building, and Bucky stopped dead at the sight of a motorcycle instead of a car. Steve noticed and smiled. “It’s just until we get to Tash's place. She’s got a car. You want to stop at your place, grab some stuff?”

Bucky simply nodded. 

Steve climbed onto the bike, straddling it and clenching the handlebars. Hesitantly, Bucky climbed on behind him, struggling not to make contact with his friend.

Steve kickstarted it and called over the noise of the engine, “Buck, you’re gonna fall if you don’t hold on.”

Blushing slightly, Bucky reached forward with his right arm, wrapping it loosly around Steve’s waist, hesitantly pressing his chest and abdomen against Steve’s back. It felt good -- warm, comfortable. Bucky relaxed slightly into his friend, resting his head against the supersoldier’s shoulder.

Then Steve put the bike into motion, and Bucky couldn’t hold back a yelp of sorts as he was thrown backwards slightly, clenching Steve’s waist tightly with his right arm and swinging his metal arm around to grasp him as well. He worried that Steve would find it too cold and hard and metallic to be pressing against him, but when Steve didn’t flinch, he relaxed again. Getting used to the motion, Bucky let the sun warm him, closing his eyes against the warm light.

He only opened them again when the engine stopped beneath him, Steve’s warmth leaving him as he swung up and off the bike. Bucky clambered off, quickly running up to his “apartment” and grabbing a bag of stuff -- he could fit everything he owned (which was basically clothes and various weapons and some cash) into a small backpack. 

Swinging the little black thing onto his shoulders, he padded silently down the stairs and got back onto the motorcycle, where Steve already was waiting. 

It was a very short ride to Natasha’s place, which was a little home not far from where the Triskelion had been. Steve parked the bike in the garage, and the two of them went inside, where they found Natasha sitting in the kitchen, finishing breakfast. “Morning, boys,” she said, seeming unfazed by Bucky’s presence, which puzzled the soldier. “I see you found him,” she added, directing the comment to Steve. 

Steve agreed with a grunt. “Last night.”

“I found _you_ ,” Bucky corrected him. “But you knew where I was anyway, including where I was living.” It hadn’t escaped the assassin that Steve had needed no directions at all as to where to go to find his “borrowed” flat.

“That was my doing,” Natasha said without shame. “He said he wanted to find you. I gave him your file, plus did some additional surveillence with Sam’s help. We found you easy enough.”

“I wasn’t hiding,” Bucky replied with a slight huff.

There was a tiny bit of silence, and then the redhaired woman raised her head from the sink where she was washing dishes. _“I know,”_ she said in Russian, meeting his eyes properly. _“If you were, I wouldn’t have found you, and I know that.”_

_“You remember,”_ Bucky said, also in Russian, his voice a little creaky.

_“Do you?”_

_“A little. It’s fuzzy.”_ Bucky looked away from her. _“I remember that I trained you. Helped you. But I was a different person then -- I was --”_

_“Yasha,”_ finished Natasha. _“I remember. It wasn’t that long ago.”_

_“But what I don’t remember,”_ Bucky said quietly, studying her countertop, _“is whether I hurt you.”_

The odd Russian words rang in the kitchen for a moment, Steve staring uncomprehendingly between the two of them, a sight out of his peripheral vision that would have amused Bucky at other times. Then Natasha reached out and placed cool fingers under his stubbled chin, raising his face so he would look at her. Then she smiled slightly, continuing in Russian: _“James. I’m not gonna lie to you -- someday you’re gonna remember every cut, every bruise, every broken bone you caused me. But despite that -- something about you made me feel like you didn’t want to. You, in case you don’t remember, have known me since I was about three. You helped me grow up, become a real person, get rid of weakness and become strong. You saved my life many times, and a couple times, it was me who kept you from putting a bullet in your head. But we’re alright. Okay? Don’t feel guilty, at least, for that aspect of your former life -- you made me who I am now, and I happen to be very proud of that person. You should be, too.”_

Bucky stared at her gratefully, unable to form words but able to think: _That was it. That was what I needed -- something good about my past as the Winter Soldier. Something useful, some good came out of everything I did._

_But I hurt her. She said I did._

_But she also acknowledges that you were a different person then -- and that even then, I didn’t act like I_ wanted _to do awful things. Something good came out of my past, and she’s standing in front of me._

Natasha released him, turning to Steve and speaking in English again, “So what’s up?”

After a brief hesitation in which his eyes flicked quickly between the redhaired assassin and the dark-haired one, Steve said slowly, “Tony and the others contacted me last night. They want us and Sam at the Tower by the end of today so we can start on the SHIELD bases.”

Natasha nodded. “Okay. We can do that.”

They all piled into her car, Bucky in the backseat alone until they picked up Sam. The crazy former soldier didn’t need much persuasion to come along, and soon they were all on a small plane headed for New York. 

Sam eyed him carefully throughout the car ride, Bucky pointedly looking away from him. But on the plane, Wilson watched him far harder, and flinched slightly at pieces of turbluence, as if he was surprised by them. Nobody else noticed -- Tash was in the cockpit, and Steve was standing nearer to the front. Sam sat against one wall, Bucky against the other. 

“Isn’t that funny, that you’d be scared of flyin’ if you can fly by yourself,” Bucky commented finally, still with his gaze pointedly sideways.

Sam raised his eyebrows. “He talks,” he said to nobody in particular. “I’m not scared of flying, Barnes.” _Jeez, it’s been awhile since someone called me_ that. “I just wasn’t paying attention when the plane decided to jump.”

“Ever single time?” replied Bucky, raising an eyebrow of his own, finally turning his head to fully look at Wilson.

Sam shrugged. “I was concentrating on something else.”

“Me.” It wasn’t a question.

Sam sighed, rubbing his hand over his face quickly, almost roughly, before replying with a completely honest tone: “Listen up, Barnes.” He hesitated then. “D’you want me to call you that? What do people call you?”

Bucky shrugged. “Natasha calls me James.”

“What does Steve call you?”

Bucky fixed him with a glare. “Nobody but Steve’s allowed to call me Bucky.” _Not yet_ , he added mentally. _I can’t tell if you all mean well or ill for me_.

Sam backed off. “Fine. James, I happen to care a lot about both of the people it seems you already know. They’re friends, and they came to me when everyone they knew -- including you, big fella -- was trying to kill them. I care about what happens to them, and I _happened_ to be there when Steve found out that you were still alive. He was breaking apart, James, and the only thing holding him together was the idea that you were still there under your Winter Soldier assassin suit. If you hurt him, I might have to get mad.”

Bucky stayed silent and still for so long that Sam must’ve thought that he wasn’t going to respond. Finally, after perhaps ten, fifteen minutes, Bucky climbed fluidly to his feet and stalked over to where Sam leaned against the wall. He leaned over the young soldier, cast his shadow over him. “ _You_ listen,” he said with as little venom as he could possibly keep out of his voice. “You think you know him? Or even _her_? I was there for both of them when nobody else thought they should be. I was there when Steve was smaller’n me, so skinny I could pick him up easier’n you could pick up a pencil. I was there when we were kids, when he was sick and asthmatic, I was there to help him relax and to make him laugh and to pick him up after his goddamn dumbass fights in alleyways and _I_ was there for longer than you. I was even there when he was bigger than me, I was there to keep his enemies off his back, I was there to save his life more times than I can _possibly_ count, more times than he knows.” Bucky paused, taking a deep breath. “Thank you for looking after him when I couldn’t, though.” He looked away swiftly. “I -- Trust me, nobody wishes I was there more than I do.”

Sam sighed. “I know you were there for him, dude. I just -- is he still in your head? The Winter Soldier?”

Bucky swallowed, hesitating. “It’s complicated,” he settled on at last as an answer.

Sam didn’t push on that, instead moving on to ask: “You said you knew Natasha, too.”

Bucky sat next to Sam, but a good foot away. “When the Soviets were in charge of me, before HYDRA fully regained control, for awhile I was Yasha. I wasn’t -- this,” he continued, gesturing at himself. “No way. I had a different personality, everything. I trained her.” Bucky nodded towards the cockpit. “I knew her as Natalia then, but that’s okay. I can see why she’d want to change her name.”

Sam chewed on his lip. “Mmm.”

There was a moment of silence, and for a moment, Bucky began to relax. It felt kind of good, to explain things simply to both himself and an outsider. Made it seem less -- uncontrollable, less overwhelming. And Sam; the ex-soldier might make a good friend, if Bucky decided he could totally trust them. Of course, he’d have to perform similar “tests” on the remaining Avengers and closely-associated SHIELD agents as soon as he came into contact with any of them. 

Then Sam spoke again: “Why does Steve call you Bucky?”

The former assassin threw his hands up in mock-disgust. “Do you ever stop asking questions?”

Sam just shrugged.

Bucky sighed. “My full name is James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky is short for Buchanan, sort of. It’s just -- a nickname. I don’t particularly like either my first or middle names, so...” He trailed off.

“Yes, but why does _Steve_ call you Bucky?”

It took a moment of furrow-browed confusion before Bucky fully understood what Sam was getting at. When he did, he began to close up shop. “And you care, why?”

Sam noticed his distrust and other such emotions making a reappearance, and quickly he put his hands out as if he were soothing a troubled horse. “Hey, hey, dude. Relax. I’m not trying to push, I just -- thought it might help if you talked about stuff. And, I guess I was curious, but if you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. ‘Kay?”

Bucky relaxed slightly. Maybe he was right. Talking had certainly seemed to help at first, and maybe -- perhaps he and Sam could be friends.

“We’re here, boys.” Natasha’s voice sounded from the cockpit.

Bucky hoisted himself to his feet as the plane landed carefully on the roof of Avengers Tower. Climbing out of the plane, he noticed that there was still plenty of room on the roof aside from the aircraft -- there was even a little dais thing that would be excellent for sitting.

Steve came up behind him, with Natasha following closely. “Straight to the elevator, then down,” Steve directed in Bucky’s ear, making him shy away just a little at the unexpected proximity to the supersoldier.

The filed into the elevator, Nat pressing the button for a floor nearly twenty below them. It opened with a ding, and they were greeted by the annoyingly loud noise of the weird, unfolding party favor _things_ , along with a plastic trumpet and an explosion of streamers and confetti. 

Bucky lashed out immediately, his surprising openness from the past day closing up suddenly as his flesh fist slammed into Steve’s stomach, causing the supersoldier to bend over with a groan. Bucky -- _am I Bucky? No_ \-- dove forward into a roll, plunging a hand into his bag for a weapon. 

A gun came out and a shot fired -- but an arm slammed into his right wrist, knocking the bullet off its target -- _tall, blond, I’ve seen him before_ \-- the gun clattered from his grip, and he turned, not angry or frustrated or vengeful, just thinking: _Threat. Threat to mission. Take out_. 

Almost immediately, he felt a heavy weight on his back, shoving him down into the floor. Reality was hazy now -- _Have I failed? What will they think, back at the base? They’ll probably punish me again_ \-- as he saw flame-colored hair and heard shouting.

His vision swam as someone leaned over him. “Bucky?” he heard, as if from a long way away. Someone’s face -- a blond someone, blue eyes -- he knew that face. How do I know him?

“Bucky.”

Someone was murmuring in his ear in Russian: _“It’s over. The Red Room is gone. HYDRA doesn’t have you anymore. Steve’s here. Best friend. You’re James Buchanan Barnes.”_

His muscles relaxed, and he dropped his head with a sigh, stopping his resistance of Natasha even though he hadn’t realized he was doing it. 

He was dimly aware of yelling: Tony Stark’s voice braying far above most of the others with, _“I thought you said he was stable! This isn’t stable!”_

And then Steve’s voice, rising far above Tony’s: _“YOU TRIGGERED HIM, YOU LUNATIC!”_

“What are they yelling about?” Bucky asked a little hoarsely. He became aware that he was kneeling, his bag far across the room.

Natasha, who crouched beside him, watched him carefully with eyes that were sad, worried, and a little wary, with dug into Bucky’s heart like a knife. “You,” she replied at last.

Then Bucky stood, scaring Tony back a step and Steve forward a step, and behind him someone tapped on his shoulder: twice. Muscle memory kicked in, and with a shudder, Bucky automatically dropped back to his knees, his arms flying behind his back to cross at the wrists, hanging his head in a bow of submission. 

The room went deadly silent, and the cloud that had re-descended on Bucky’s mind cleared slowly as he waited, senses tingling, for forceful hands and blows that didn’t come. He lifted his head very slowly, his arms falling back to his sides, staring at his now-shaking hands. _They did that to me. They made me into a machine. Whenever they tapped me like that, I’d do this_. He did know, without knowing how, that verbal commands weren’t subconsciously ingrained into him, although he had responded to them before. 

He bowed forward over his palms, his hair falling into his face. _I can’t... I don’t even have control over this simple, simple thing..._ He refused to even acknowledge the fairly good fact that he was relatively sure there weren’t other, similar attack-dog tendencies programmed into him.

He could feel their gazes, heavy on him, and he looked up slowly into the sadly weighted eyes of Natasha, such a bright green, before turning to Steve’s brighter blue and finding the same amount of sorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much to add to this one, guys, other than sorry for waiting so long. Hope you enjoyed!


	4. Chapter 4

Steve was angry.

No, he was more than that. He was furious.

It had taken Natasha less than thirty seconds to stop Bucky’s attack, and despite the obvious display of how easy it would be in the future and how quickly Bucky reassociated with reality, Tony was having a little freak-out.

Nobody was willing to talk about the clearly involuntary submissive behavior when Clint had tapped on the former assassin’s shoulder.

It had been thirty minutes since Steve had led a now-docile-but-still-disassociated Bucky into his apartment -- Tony had one built for every member of the Avengers (including Thor, who wasn’t here, but nobody could get into anybody else’s flat without either being with them as they unlocked it or having the two-word verbal passcode and somehow forging the thumb-print scan), and even an extra Sam, and one each for Pepper and Rhodey, but not one for Bucky. So now Bucky’s was in Steve’s flat, and Tony was still arguing.

“You said he was stable.”

Steve groaned, wishing he could slam his head against the table without appearing as if he was giving up. Hard. “Tony, we’ve been over this. I never said he was stable, I said he was _less unstable_. And no way in hell am I throwing him out.”

“He. Is. Dangerous,” Tony ground out, and Steve half-expected him to stamp his foot to emphasize his point. “I won’t have him here, Steve, not if he threatens the well-being of my home and this team.”

“Did you see how fast Natasha had him under control? Did you see how quickly he reassociated with the fact that he’s not the Winter Soldier anymore? _Did you not see that?_ Besides, he threatened nobody but me. I was the one he hit, I was the one he was going to shoot at. I accept the risks.”

“It might _not_ be you next time. It might be Natasha, or Pepper, or _Bruce_. Can you imagine the damage that’ll do? _Can you_?”

_“I’m not throwing him out!”_ shouted Steve, raising his voice at last, slamming his palm flat against the counter in front of him in anger. “He has nowhere else to go, nobody else to trust! He only trusts me and Natasha out of all of the people on this planet, do you realize what that must be like? And he was there for me when nobody else was, don’t you _understand_? Back when none of you were even close to alive, he was there for me, he saved my life a million times. He’s my best friend, and I love --” Steve pulled himself up short, before deciding, _what the hell_. “I love him,” he finished brokenly. “What would you do if it were Pepper, Tony? Huh? I’ve loved him since we were kids, and now I don’t even think he remembers -- I’ve got to stay with him. I -- I lost him once, I thought forever. I’m never losing him again.”

Tony stared hard at him. He didn’t seem surprised by Steve’s confession, or anything else. “So that’s why you’ve been so interested in LGBTQ+ rights,” he finally commented. He sighed, throwing his hands up. “You’re right. I’d do the same. I’m just trying to find what’s best for the team, Steve. You know that, right?”

Steve ran a hand over his face. “Yes, Tony. I do.”

“Then it’s between you, him, and if Nat’s into it too, then her. We’ll support you guys, we won’t throw him out if he screws up, blah blah blah. Just -- try to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone, okay? Including you.”

With that, Stark exited. With flair, as always.

Steve breathed out heavily, running his hand through his hair. He hadn’t admitted his feelings for Bucky for a _long_ time, basically since he’d confessed them to Bucky himself so many years ago. 

Now, Bucky probably couldn’t remember anything about their relationship before both of them went into ice. Although, Steve remembered seeing a distinct blush high on Bucky’s cheekbones and on the tips of his ears when the assassin had been straddling him the night when Bucky had followed him home. This was always a a fairly reliable tell for when Bucky was either embarrassed or beginning to get turned on. 

Or both.

With a sigh, Steve heaved himself to his feet and wandered off towards his apartment. Thumb-scanning his way in, he mumbled the verbal passcode -- which Tony had set up, so it was “Captain Sexy” -- and opened the door. 

Bucky was sitting at Steve’s desk, flipping through the supersoldier’s sketchbook. He glanced up swiftly at Steve’s entrance, before looking back down. “I forgot you used to do this,” he murmured. 

Steve slid the door shut quietly behind him. “You okay?”

Bucky shrugged. He hesitated for a moment, then said quietly, “I thought I had myself under control. I thought -- that I was safe to be around people.” He ran his hand distractedly through his long hair. “I don’t think I can be with others, Steve. It’s too dangerous.”

“Bucky, it’s been little more than three weeks. I wasn’t expecting you to be fully recovered. That’s ridiculous. It may be years before your totally recovered from everything you’ve gone through. Everybody else agrees. They want you to be in a safe place to recover. Everyone wants you safe. Especially me.”

“Except Stark,” said Bucky shrewdly.

Steve sighed. “He was just trying to understand. He agrees now.”

Bucky grunted, shrugged again. “Steve, he’s right. I’m a major danger to everyone here.”

“We all are. If anybody hurts Bruce, he could tear New York up from the studs and kill everyone. Natasha, as you well know, has had the same experiences as you in a lot of ways. We’re all dangerous, Bucky. You are no more so than any others of us, and you saw how quickly Natasha reassociated you. You’re quickly coming back to yourself in every way, and I saw the trajectory of that shot you sent at me. It would never have hit me.”

“This time, Steve.” The assassin’s voice was almost monotone. “This time. What about next time, huh? I could hurt someone, kill someone. Hurt _you_ , kill _you_.”

“I accept that risk, Buck. You’ve been recovering remarkably fast.”

“I’ve found that it’s faster with you around,” muttered the assassin. “But they’re -- the memories, they’re _sneaking_ back. I’ll just find myself accidentally accessing a memory that I didn’t have a week ago, or a day ago, or an _hour_ ago. It took you a few repetitions of my name, puppy eyes, and a couple well-placed phrases that connect to powerful memories for you to break _seventy years_ of brainwashing.” His mouth quirked kind of wryly, although he looked lost to Steve. _It’s happening too fast for him_.

Steve sighed, sitting. “How much _can_ you remember?”

“More than before. I don’t think I’ll be able to tell when I’ve got ‘em all back. I don’t even know if that’s possible. I just --” Suddenly, Bucky just stopped. Stopped talking. 

Steve stared at him for awhile, like a living, breathing statue. It gave him a chance to study his friend as he had been unable with the former assassin’s intense instincts and ability to sense when he was being watched. His dark hair was longer than it had been when he’d fallen, to his shoulders. It wasn’t even close to how dirty it had been when Bucky had showed up at Steve’s D.C. apartment, though, thanks to the shower this morning. His hazel eyes were dark with emotion now, and yet managed to be glazed with a look of utter disassociation, dark shadows under them. His stubble had grown more prominent in the few weeks since he’d seen him, almost growing into a full beard. The metal arm that was so new and yet looked so natural on him was resting on the desk, and Steve leaned sideways to get a better look at it. A pang resonated through his chest when he saw that the red star on the shoulder had been scratched out, violently, and a tiny, engraved note was next to it: _Paint over_. 

Suddenly, Bucky stiffened, his eyes clearing. “Wanna sleep,” he muttered, rather hoarsely.

Steve nodded. “Come on,” he said quietly, standing. Bucky stood, his left hand reaching out to curl around Steve’s right fingers. The metal was cold, but somehow it felt good. 

Bucky fell into the bed limply, falling asleep almost instantly. And Steve slid in next to him, sitting up and watching him.


	5. Chapter 5

Bucky jerked in his sleep, crying out. 

 

_He lay against the ground, sharp  stones digging into his stomach. His gun was pressed against his shoulder and propped up with his left arm._

_The job was to spin the car off the cliff at the most narrow point. The idea was to make it look like an accident, so they’d needed someone who could hit a mark from over a half-mile away._

_Which was why he was out of ice._

_Sighting down the scope, he picked out the car in his crosshairs, a convertible. A tiny chord struck in the back of his mind at the sight of the man’s face; Howard Stark. He knew that man._

_This displeased him._ I don’t remember him. I’ve never seen him except in the file. I don’t know anybody. I am nobody. I am the Winter Soldier _._

_He hadn’t even asked why the wife had to be crossed off with him._

_He breathed out with his gun as he squeezed the trigger, sending the bullet flying and punching into the tire. Once he was sure that the target had been hit, he stood up and walked away. He didn’t wait to watch the car swerve, to hear its occupants yelling, to watch them go sailing over the edge of the cliff._

_Just walked away, back towards the ice and the machine that would take this memory from him._

 

Bucky sat up swiftly with a gasp, feeling a powerful hold on his arm -- his metal arm, which he could somehow feel, just a little. It responded to his thoughts, he knew that. It had hurt like hell after they’d first attached it, and it hurt ten times more whenever they tried to modify or upgrade it with it still attached to him. It was clearly hooked into his nueral systems in every way.

“Bucky?”

The assassin slowly became aware that he was digging his metal fingers into Steve’s wrist, who was staring at him with a look of severe concern. 

“Don’t go,” croaked the assassin, his hand curling into Steve’s skin. 

“I’m won’t -- I’m not going anywhere, Bucky,” he said gently, moving to cover the metal hand with his own left palm.

They sat like that for hours as dawn slowly bled into the room, Bucky’s grip slowly relaxing until he was able to feel the imprints the metal had left in Steve’s skin. Neither of them slept until the sun had risen, at which point they got up entirely, Bucky because he was afraid and Steve because he was unwilling to leave Bucky alone in the dark. 

With unspoken consent, the two of them deftly navigated around each other as they got up, got dressed, and moved out to the kitchen. It was about five-thirty, and the only person who was up was Tony, who was in his lab.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Steve asked Bucky as the assassin settled himself onto a stool at the counter, the blond supersoldier busying himself with beginning breakfast.

Bucky sighed, dragging his fingers through his long hair distractedly. “I -- maybe. Ask me something.”

“How many tries did it take for them to get your memories out?” asked Steve, cracking an egg.

Bucky went a little still, his eyes acquiring a far-away look. He remembered how angry the doctors were at first -- he retained so many memories. “A lot,” he said at last. “I remember -- I remember falling, and I woke up in a snow-drift beside the river. It probably saved my life... I somehow lost my arm in the fall, and it was bleeding a lot. Zola found me, not long after. I must’ve blacked out or something, because then I woke up with this freakin’ thing,” -- he jerked his silvery metal arm -- “and throttled the nearest doctor with it.” He swallowed hard. “The first murder I did with it, but definitely not the last.” Bucky closed his eyes, breathing out softly.

“You don’t have to --” started Steve, but Bucky’s flesh arm shot up with its palm out.

“No, Steve. It helps.” Taking another breath, Bucky continued, “They started wiping then. Every time they stopped, I watched them shout in German at each other, and I think it had something to do with the word ‘ _resiliance_.’ I wasn’t responding properly to the memory wipe. I think -- I think Zola used the same thing on me, just once, before you came the first time.”

Bucky remembered watching the scientists between the first few wipes, panic resonating through him as he strained hard against the straps holding him down. But he still fought -- hard, and they were so angry that his memories weren’t wiping. They were so, so angry. They couldn’t properly brainwash him , he was too strong, too rebellious -- so they stuck him in cryo. And waited. They pulled him out not long after, though, the shortest time he was ever in cryo. He remembered the sick grin of one of them as they secured him in front of a screen and made him watch -- hours and hours of newscasts about...about Steve. Rogers. His best friend, and he was dead, plunged straight into the Antarctic or something. They found it easier after that, the brainwashing. Because Steve was gone, so what else was there to hold out for? But he still fought a little. _Half of his memories gone, watching sick bastards shout at each other in mixtures of Russian and German, terror waving through him as he realized that he could barely remember how the light shone in Steve’s hair. Then later, crouching in the dark, sobbing quietly to himself, waiting for something...Steve came the first time...who’s Steve? Who am I waiting for? The hope for someone -- who? -- to come and save him slowly bled out of him, becoming a cold-hearted, faint dream of a past life that held no more meaning for him. At least, not until he had been more than a few days out of cryo._

Bucky kept rolling on. “And any time I wasn’t in cryo, or actually being wiped, I would start to remember. I --” he shuddered, his eyes closing. “I waited,” he rasped. “But I didn’t know what I was waiting for...”

Steve made a choking noise, and Bucky jerked his head up in surprise, his eyes opening. 

The supersoldier, his oldest friend, was leaning over the stove, obviously trying quite hard not to cry. “Me,” he finally whispered as Bucky stared dumbly at him. “You must’ve been waiting for me.”

Bucky consulted his sparsely returned memories and had to conclude that Steve was absolutely right. He didn’t say anything, however, just waited. 

“The dream, last night,” Steve said at last, straightening up. “What happened?”

Bucky hesitated for so long that Steve turned to look at him, his bright blue eyes still a little watery. At long last, Bucky said quietly, staring at his fingers, “I’m beginning to remember the people I’ve killed, Steve.”

Steve didn’t reply for awhile, and so they sat in silence until the supersoldier placed a plate of food in front of the assassin. “Eat,” he said quietly.

Bucky complied, relieved that it gave him something to do with his hands. 

Finally, Steve asked through a mouthful of omelet, “Not that it matters, but who? Anybody important?”

Bucky closed his eyes again, and when he spoke, his voice rasped harshly through the still, silent air of morning. “Howard.”

Steve didn’t reply except to say “Ah” and put down his fork for awhile. 

Feeling like a monster at this point, Bucky managed to eat the rest of his own omelet before shoving the dish into the sink. Then, he turned to leave, only to be stopped by a hand on his shoulder. He turned in askance to find Steve staring at him. “Where --”

“Away,” growled Bucky, his voice rough. “I’m a killer, Steve, I didn’t even -- I didn’t even stop to think when they told me to cross off Maria, as well.”

Steve flinched. Barely, but it was there.

Thoroughly disgusted with himself, Bucky ripped his shoulder from Steve’s grip and was halfway out the door before Steve’s voice sounded again: “Would you do it now?”

Bucky stopped dead, completely still. He turned back slowly. “What?”

“Would you kill them now, as you are, as the man I knew in Brooklyn, the guy I’ve known since childhood, as you are _now_ , would you kill them? Howard, Maria, any of your other missions?”

Snarling a bit, Bucky didn’t even have to come close to pretending to be affronted. “ _No_ , Steve, how could you think --”

He registered Steve’s look of satisfaction and realized that he had been specifically maneuvered. Closing his mouth, the assassin subsided with a grunt against the wall. 

“Fine, I get your point.”

“I don’t blame you, Buck,” said Steve quietly, gently. “This is everything I’ve dreamed for -- for a long time, to have you alive and relatively okay and with me. You were brainwashed, and I _know_ that if you had had a choice you would have chosen to save every target you ever crossed.”

Bucky swallowed and looked down. It was a nice sentiment, but it wasn’t quite so simple as Steve assumed -- despite the brainwashing, he had managed to retain little bits of his personality; the way he drummed his fingers on his leg when he was impatient, the expressions he made, the way he would run his hand through his hair when stressed or frustrated. Of course, these quirks only showed up again after spending some time away from the ice and the machine, but they were still _there_. 

There had been jobs that hadn’t called for quick bullet to the head or a plummet from a cliff, and the Winter Soldier hadn’t given them something quick. There had been jobs where he’d hesitated before pulling the trigger, but he’d do it anyway -- not out of spite or hatred or anger, but out of fear. _If I don’t, what’ll they do? If I don’t, what am I anymore?_ These were the times when he got himself out fast and willingly handed himself over to the brain-wiping machine.

Still, maybe Steve was right. Maybe it was simple, maybe he was foolishly applying meaning to things he’d done as someone else -- but he couldn’t shake the thought that part of him was still a killing machine, knew that if someone said the wrong thing to him, he would fly into action and destroy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today is going to be a HUGE posting day. All the chapters I've completed are coming out and onto this thing, because today's the last day 'til LATE August that I can guarantee that I'll be on to do so. I'm so sorry, guys. This is my only long fic right now, so I'm focusing attention on this.   
> Still, I CAN guarantee that today, we're getting up to chapter 13.


	6. Chapter 6

Months passed. 

Natasha had categorized Bucky’s triggers, helping him shake off nearly every one of them. The remaining ones were arbitrary -- something random that reminded him of something traumatizing that would send him into an anxiety attack, or more rarely into attack mode. Every time, either Steve or Natasha was there, or both of them, to help Bucky calm down. 

The Avengers successfully secured almost every SHIELD base, which really meant going in and eliminating every HYDRA agent they crossed -- Hill had sent out a secure message to the badges of all agents saying something that had managed to separate the loyal agents from the bad ones. Apparently, most of the lower, less-important agents of HYDRA whose cover wasn’t important had tiny red star tattoos on their shoulders, which was also very useful information. 

The agents who were still “loyal” to SHIELD had been ordered to disappear, take a cover or go home. There was no indication that they were going to be asked to rejoin any new SHIELD of any sort.

Hill had asked them also to remove every piece of equipment that could be removed and destroy what was left. It had felt like a waste to Steve and especially to Tony, but they did so, bringing every piece of specialized equipment to the Sandbox for either destuction or burial. 

The Fridge was the last base, although weeks ago, Hill had lied and said that every base was secure.

Steve wasn’t quite happy.

Every day, he would wake up next to Bucky, although oftentimes they would already be very awake, having been awakened by Bucky’s night terrors. They’d get up before dawn, eat breakfast in silence, and climb to the roof of the building and sit in quiet to watch the sunrise. If Bucky wanted to, he’d talk. If not, they just stayed. 

Almost every day the team was gone on missions. They left Pepper, of course, with Bucky, and the assassin claimed that he was doing much better. And to be honest, Steve agreed with him. His memories were coming back patchily, and he was having lots of epiphany moments, insisting on explaining each new memory if Steve was in the room when he realized or writing it down for later if now. Sometimes, though, he would be in the middle of explaining one and he’d break off, looking confused. Natasha was his favorite, besides of course Steve, because she seemed to understand exactly what he was going through.

Behind his back, he could hear Bucky and Natasha talking in Russian. He had long since given up on asking them what they were saying, so he had taken to recording their speech and playing it back, asking JARVIS to translate for him. JARVIS could do it in such a way that he could basically have the original voices speaking with the original inflection, just in English. 

Most of the time, it was things like: _“He’s so cute when he’s angry,”_ from a rather thoughtful Bucky, and then Natasha would reply, _“If you tell him that, five bucks says he’ll turn the color of my hair.”_ To which Bucky replied, _“You’re on.”_ He had proceeded to carry out the bet, resulting in him reluctantly forking over five dollars.

Steve had begun picking up some Russian, just some general things, including a few swears. 

Bucky continued to talk in his sleep, in the most bizarre languages and very rarely in English. Upon consulting both Natasha and JARVIS, Steve found that it was a range from Spanish to French to Japanese, although it _was_ most often in Russian. With his new knowledge of Russian, Steve would be woken up and able to translate: things from _“no stop please, don’t make me, I don’t want to, stop it”_ to _“stop begging it makes no difference.”_

It was happening less and less now, but he had absolutely made a principle of never mentioning it to Bucky, whose memories of murders and horrors were coming back quicker and quicker. Along with them came inside jokes from his and Steve’s childhood, memories of fights in alleys that when he referenced them, the other members of the team were alternately surprised (and then upon consideration, not so surprised) at Steve’s tenacity and relieved and shocked at how quickly and often recklessly Bucky had sprung to his aid, which often ended in him getting far more hurt than Steve ever had. 

All in all, Bucky was a million times better, back to his mischevious, kind of cocky and very proud old self, although part of him remained wary and tense. He hadn’t been near any triggers for awhile, but they all knew that he would be more and more often. Just because his memories were back and he was himself again didn’t mean that he was healed or rid of HYDRA’s programming and/or torture. 

Now, they were preparing to take on the Fridge, and they had invited Bucky to come along. To Steve’s all-consuming worry and slight excitement, the assassin had agreed.

Snapping out of his thoughts, Steve hefted his shield, turning to look at Bucky, who was outfitted in the same leather armor he’d worn as the Winter Soldier, with the boots, reinforced leather pants, the protective jacket and everything. Sensing Steve’s gaze, Bucky glanced up with a tiny grin. “I’m not wearing the muzzle.”

“I should hope not,” murmured Steve. The mask, which Bucky appropriately called a muzzle, had been a leash on him for HYDRA. Plus, even if he’d wanted to, Bucky couldn’t have worn it, because the team had burnt it on the roof a few weeks ago.

They had also replaced the straight-jacket-like leather armor shirt that he had worn with the dark blue protective coat he’d worn for most of the missions with the Howling Commandos, because it served the same protective purposes.

Bucky turned, and Steve smiled as the light fell on his left shoulder, where the red star used to be. At the assassin’s request, Steve had painted over it with silver, which hid the star completely from ever being seen again. The silver paint matched well with the rest of the arm, as Tony had helped -- the engineer had offered to fix the scratches that Bucky had left there, but Bucky had declined, and they let the paint pool in the marks. Now, Bucky had no physical reminders that he had ever belonged to anybody other than himself.

Natasha opened the door, in her own leather fighting outfit. “Come on, boys, Tony’s impatient and Hill’s waiting to give orders.” She disappeared through the door, leaving them to follow. They did.

They met in the center of the penthouse, where they could see the screens from all angles, where Hill was pictured, looking impatient. Tony, Clint and Sam were all suited up as well, with Natasha quickly joining them to be followed by Steve, who was hyperaware that Bucky was more shadowing him than following him. 

Steve barely caught Hill’s slightly distrustful look in Bucky’s direction, but he knew that the assassin would have caught it too. Leveling a heavy glare at the agent, he curled his hand tightly around Bucky’s metal one. He felt him relax slightly.

“Where’s Banner?” asked Hill. 

“In the lab,” replied Tony. “We’re not making him come.”

“Rhodes?”

“Also staying. He’s got something with his army boys most days, you know.”

“And Pepper doesn’t usually come,” completed Hill with a nod. “Alright. The Fridge. This is the final SHIELD base. I know that you’re used to the whole ‘get things out then destroy the whole place’ approach, ‘cause that’s what I’ve been telling you to do so far. But this time, things’re a little different.” She paused, then continued, “This place has been in HYDRA’s hold since the day after the Triskelion fell. All it took was one known HYDRA agent --” a picutre popped up on the screen of a middle-aged man with hard eyes and, oddly enough, laughter lines, “-- named John Garrett. Well, him and a member of an elite team --” this time a picture of a younger man, clearly a combat specialist, with dark hair and cold-yet-vulnerable eyes that reminded Steve of a Vulcan’s, “-- named Grant Ward. I’m not sure how much you know about the Clairvoyant, but for a few months before the full-scale attack, someone was circling the team that Ward belonged to. A group of fairly elite people: two specialists, two scientists, one high-ranking agent, and a communications technical specialist.”

Hill went on to explain a lot of complicated context about the Clairvoyant and the Extremis serum (at which Tony made a sort of twitch), Cybertek (which made Bucky twitch), implying that they had completely eliminated the Clairvoyant/Cybertek etc threat, Garrett was dead, Ward was in custody, and eventually finishing with the fact that HYDRA had been reduced to the few still at the Fridge. Fury had named his successor before going off-grid, who was the high-ranking leader of the specialized team (who apparently was _not_ Hill), and that follower had re-recruited Hill to help him rebuild SHIELD from scratch -- it was just him and his team, with Hill, rebuilding an entire organization. 

When she finally finished, Steve raised his hand slightly and said quietly, “Two questions. One: was the context really necessary? Two: who was the specialized team besides Ward?”

Hill regarded him for a moment before replying, “I wanted you to get that these are dangerous people, and they _emptied_ the Fridge of everything useful, including its prisoners. You are to blow it up, no questions asked, nothing else comes out of it. As for your second information, that information is highly classified.”

There was a tense moment as a battle of wills took place: Hill, with her security clearance, and the Avengers, with little clearance but the fact that they were heroes who saved the world. 

At last, Hill sighed. “Well, there basically is no SHIELD anymore. Just the Hub and the Sandbox have been left, and the organization has collapsed. As you know, most of the loyal agents have seeped into other intelligence communities, while still remaining in contact with me just in case. With the exception of this team.” Pictures began appearing. “Their former specialist, Ward, has been replaced with Agent Antoine Triplett, who is also skilled as a medic. He is the grandson of a former Howling Commando.” The agent of SHIELD shot a glance at Bucky and Steve, who both stiffened. “Then their _real_ specialist, sometimes known as the Cavalry for her combat skill, is Agent Melinda May. Their scientists are biochemist Jemma Simmons and engineer Leo Fitz. Their communications specialist is a level one agent simply known as Skye.” Hill glanced up as Skye’s picture landed on the screen next to the other four. “She claims to have given herself this name, and was known as ‘Mary Sue Poots’ in her childhood at orphanges and foster homes. Her birth name is unknown to anybody living.”

“Don’t blame her for changing it,” muttered Clint.

The pictures began disappearing, and Hill acted like the matter was closed. 

“Wait,” Bucky interjected quietly. “Who’s their high-rank leader? You know, the new _Director_ of _SHIELD_?” He heavily emphasized the two words, implying beyond a doubt that they were important. 

Another very awkward silence before Hill ran a hand over her face. “That is information that _very_ few people know. And we keep it that way.” This time, she wasn’t yielding.

Suddenly, Bucky stepped out from behind Steve and began to pace across the floor between the screen and the team. “You mentioned that he took extensive medical damage during the Battle of New York,” he murmured quietly, but loud enough so that the silence was pierced as they all watched him, some in disbelief and confusion. “But the only SHIELD-allied people on the frontlines were this team, or on the helicarrier just before the _actual_ Battle. Since he’s clearly not one of these people, it must’ve been the helicarrier. There were a lot of reported injuries from the events on the helicarrier, but I’m inclined to think that that he was about as close to dying as you could get, because clearly you faked his death or pulled a similar stunt. There were, surprisingly, less of those reported, and the only reported extensive damage of a level of eight or above, where the idea of ‘high-rank’ begins in SHIELD protocol, was Agent Philip Coulson.”

Bucky stopped pacing and looked up, triumphant, at a stunned and shocked and slightly fearful Maria Hill. Half the team let out gasps of amazement (and hope -- _Was Coulson alive_?) and Natasha just regarded her fellow assassin with soft pride.

“ _That’s_ what you’re hiding? You care so much about Coulson’s _fake death_ that you’d lie to the team who’d give _anything_ to know he was alive?” demanded Tony suddenly. “How many SHIELD agents know he’s alive? Probably like a billion, right? You can’t be a high-rank without making some noise. How many know that this is _important_?”

Maria Hill opened her mouth to reply, but Bucy interjected.

He shook his finger as something new dawned on him. “No, Tony, that’s not all of it,” he muttered, resuming his pacing. “The medical records on Coulson weren’t faked until he shows up randomly in _Tahiti_ , of all places. I have experience with faked files, so I know. Plus, there’s a whole file _with pictures_ of Coulson’s dead body. He was dead for days. You didn’t fake his death,” said the assassin, turning back to Hill. _“You brought him back to life.”_

Stunned silence descended on the room.

Finally, Hill forced a smile and said, “You are quite the brilliant logician, Barnes. I’ve never come into contact with anybody --”

“Is it true?” interrupted Clint quietly.

Hill shot him a frustrated, irritated look. At last, she sighed and said, “Yes. It is. Fury authorized it, said he ‘decided not to bury Coulson.’ Don’t ask me for details,” she continued warningly, raising her hands in an almost-surrender gesture. “I don’t know any. You want some, dig up Fury. Or ask Coulson himself,” she added reluctantly. “He’s been out searching for answers --”

“You lied to _him_ , too?!” shrieked Tony. “What’d you tell him, ‘You got stabbed by Loki and miraculously survived’?”

“Basically,” snapped Hill in return. “It’s -- this was all based on Fury’s orders, you’ve got to understand. I don’t know anything more than that Coulson died and was brought back to life a few days later. I know that it was painful, I know they erased his memories and replaced them with different ones, of an island and peaceful recovery.”

Bucky shuddered visibly at the mention of erasing memories, and Steve cast him a concerned look that was replied to with a stiff jerk of the assassin’s head. 

“All I knew was that _Coulson_ could never know. Very few people knew about this: his medical team, only one of which was in regular contact with agents; me, Melinda May, Fury.”

“Probably his whole team by now, though, which includes Ward, which means HYDRA knows,” interrupted Bucky.

Hill stared hard at him. “Everybody else knew only what Coulson told them -- what Fury planted in his head.”

Bucky shrugged. “I’m inclined to think that he trusts his team -- clearly he does, because wasn’t his mission when they took down Cybertek _partially_ to get revenge on Ward, the sleeper who they trusted? He probably didn’t tell them at first, keeping your secrets like a good little soldier -- but I bet you that he at least told Skye. You think I haven’t seen her file? She was gutshot. Twice. Stomach and intestines perforated, _dying_. Coulson and his team disappeared from the medical facility where the diagnosis was given, wandered off -- came back with a completely healed communications specialist. Rumors, well-informed ones, hint that they found where Coulson was treated when you brought him back to life, and found some miracle drug to save her. They blew up the place, either on purpsoe or by accident, but HYDRA wanted some of that drug, so Coulson most likely felt inclinded to tell her where they found it and why it was important.”

Hill just sighed. “If you want to talk to Phil, you’ll have to wait -- he’s travelling around with his team, rebuilding SHIELD. He knows more than I do, at this point. The only one who knows more is Fury. Now, can we stop talking about this? It’s irrelevant, I’m sick of defending myself, and you guys have work to do.”

With grunts of annoyance, the team agreed. Time to go deal with HYDRA again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I brought in Agents of SHIELD...:) no I'm not. I love it too much. They won't be in here a lot, but they will be here.


	7. Chapter 7

Piling into the plane, Sam clapped Bucky on the shoulder. “That was incredible, dude,” he said.

Bucky shrugged. “I just snooped on some SHIELD files and reasoned it out.”

Tony was grumpy. “I _hacked_ SHIELD!” he complained. “I found every secret --”

“You missed a lot of big ones,” Clint pointed out. “From HYDRA, to Coulson, to _Fury_ still being alive, we had to get that from Cap --”

“To be fair, those last two secrets that was important _after_ I hacked the system,” Tony pointed out. 

“But _still_!” snapped Clint in reply, clambering into the pilot’s seat.

“And I thought nobody used the word ‘hack’ anymore,” said Bucky quietly as he removed his sniper-rifle from its protective case, a slight smirk on his face that he knew only Steve could see as his back was to the others.

There was some silence before Tony muttered, “Smartass,” and the conversation was dropped. 

Ten minutes before they landed, Natasha began calling out stats as Clint piloted, saying things about how heavily armed and how dangerous the entrenchments of the HYDRA agents were. “We have to go in through the top, and there are over a hundred floors, plus underground ones and hidden ones. Most of it is empty, but the agents there are in charge of keeping it as secure as possible.”

Bucky suddenly stood, casting a glance at Steve, who quickly rose with him, looking slightly confused. “I have an idea,” said the assassin quietly.

He carefully sketched out the plan: First, Thor would go to the top, summon some lightning, knock out the electricity through the building. Then, Bucky and Steve made their way around the outside with flying assistance from Tony and Sam, where Steve’s job would be to guard Bucky as he shot down as many through the windows as possible. Once the top floors were clear, Natasha and Clint would move from top to bottom, sneaking past any remaining and getting to the basement while the other five followed to pick off the remaining agents. _Someone_ would find a way to blow the place, and they’d get the heck out.

The plan was accepted, and everybody stood tense, waiting as the cargo ramp lowered and Thor exited first, landing on the roof and they watched as he summoned a ton of lightning, zapping the building dry of electricity. Bucky cast a grin at Steve, who was waiting to get on Tony’s back for flying purposes.

The air whistled inside the plane, and the first wave of gunfire shot at them.

Taking it as a signal, Bucky clambered onto Sam’s back, hooking his legs around the ex-soldier’s waist as they threw themselves out of the plane, the wings snapping open. 

Bucky couldn’t help yelling in exhiliration as Sam wheeled and banked, avoiding doing normal technical maneuvers for fear of throwing his occupant off. Raising the gun, Bucky sighted down the scope and released a spray of bullets, each one connecting and spelling death for another HYDRA agent. 

Suddenly, Sam shouted and was forced into a barrel-roll to avoid a barrage of gunfire, and Bucky’s thighs couldn’t hold on despite their strength being near-Natasha level. He fell surprisingly quietly, twisting in the air so he was at least falling with his feet _down_ , making his gun of some use to shatter windows and kill some HYDRA agents as he whipped by a bunch of floors.

Then he finally did yell in surprise when something barreled into him, knocking him off course -- or as he realized a moment later, back onto it, because Steve was the one who had propelled him towards Sam before having Tony come pluck him out of the air. 

As he hooked his legs back onto Sam’s back, he deliberately kept it loose and he shouted into Wilson’s ear: “You can do normal maneuvers! Steve and I are gonna do some of our own.”

Sam indicated that he’d heard, and as they flew back up, Bucky made a mental note to ask Tony for a flight suit of his own -- flying was just really, really cool. 

Over the course of the next five minutes, Bucky and Steve spent time leaping off their respective rides and flipping through the air, taking care of all of the outer floors in the process. It was an exhilirating and strange experience for Bucky, because first of all he was alternately flying and falling -- and secondly, when he was falling, he was trusting either Tony or Sam to save his life. _Trust_ wasn’t something he gave out easily. 

“That’s all the floors,” Bucky called down to Steve and Sam from where he perched on Tony’s back. The building looked like a hull of what it had once been; a tall pinnacle of glass and metal engineering, with only one entrance and exit -- at the very top. The glass had supposedly been bulletproof. Now, every piece of glass was shattered with Bucky’s above-strength shots, and the metal husk of the building stood there rather dejectedly.

Raising his wrist to his mouth, Bucky said quietly into the radio, “Tasha, building’s ready.”

An explosion sounded very loudly near the top of the building, with lightning cracking as Thor, Clint, and Natasha obviously entered. “Already in,” her voice sounded from the microphone.

With a sigh, Bucky launched himself off of Stark’s back, spinning himself into a ball that turned over and over and over, the cold of his gun pressing into his stomach as he flipped, his eyes tightly closed but even if they weren’t he knew that he would see a blur of sea and rock and sky. Then a hand clamped on the back of his collar, and he choked as he was pulled out of his tuck and up by a yelling Sam, Bucky’s own shriek becoming a shout of exhiliration as they tipped up, G-forces increasing and then releasing their hold so he was practically weightless, floating upwards a bit so he could grab Steve’s wrist. The supersoldier then promptly _threw_ him at Stark, who deftly caught him with a _clang_ of the titanium-alloy hand against Bucky’s left arm and tossed him over his shoulder, leaving him to hook his arm around the inventor’s torso with another dull _clink_ of metal-on-metal.

Bucky breathed heavily as they neared the landing platform, his mind both clear and fuzzy from the adrenaline rush and the feeling in the pit of his stomach, the shakiness of his limbs that made him laugh breathily as he shifted just slightly. He was hyperaware of pressing against the hard, cold-but-heating-with-strain metal of Tony’s suit, of the wind in his ears and his hair, or the sudden lack of weight on his chest. But at the same time as he was so totally aware of everything, able to use all of his senses to their full capacity, he was completely sure that he would be unable to remember the buzz of his body’s drugs thrumming in his veins. 

“Why’d you do that?” asked Tony, sounding genuinely curious.

“Needed the buzz,” gasped Bucky in reply. “Need a flight suit, Tony.”

The suit’s helmet nodded. “I’ll work on it.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

They landed with a loud sort of clang, and Sam, with Steve, landed very shortly after. “James,” Nat’s voice crackled suddenly through Bucky’s communicator, sounding pained and almost gasping. “Need help. Twelfth floor from the bottom.”

Immediately, Bucky jumped off of Tony’s back, sprinted to the edge of the building, and did a swift calculation. “Steve, I’m gonna need your weight,” he said almost absentmindedly, reaching behind him and latching onto the supersoldier’s wrist. Then, he jumped.

The wind howled in his ears, whipping his hair around his head like a dark halo. Steve, falling next to him, was too surprised to shout out, although he looked minorly terrified.

Laughing at the reemergence of his adrenaline rush, Bucky turned and curled himself around Steve like a koala, narrowing their surface area and thus falling faster. 

Because of the angle of Bucky’s jump, they were falling outwards from the building, curving away from it. But Bucky was completely ready for this, and had in fact planned for it -- he wrested Steve’s shield from him, holding it up and out to his right. As he expected, the air whistled through the metal, not using it as a parachute, exactly -- but definitely slowing their fall, and _certainly_ angling them into a floor very low to the ground.

They landed with a crash on broken glass, but otherwise fairly unharmed, skidding along the shards of clear, sharp material. “Ow,” groaned Steve as he rolled to a stop.

Bucky breathed out a laugh, climbing to his feet with a wince. Couple cracked ribs, dozens of scratches from the glass, and about fifty-zillion bruises.

Maybe not _unharmed_. 

Steve wasn’t much better, but the serum had made it so he could get up with barely a wince. Bucky, who actually had a fairly similar but less-muscle-growing serum in his veins, had to groan his way the next step forward. 

Steve was at his side in an instant, and a hiss of sympathy escaped him. “Buck, are you okay?”

The assassin stared at him in askance. “Yeah,” he replied. “Now c’mon, Natasha needs us --”

“If you’re okay, then why is your arm practically falling off?” Steve looked almost dangerous, and for once Bucky couldn’t read his expression. 

He glanced down at his right arm, then raised his eyebrows in surprise. A huge gash was opened from his shoulder to his wrist, and it was bleeding profusely. Reflexively, he closed his fist, clenching the muscles in his arm and the blood ran a little faster. “It’s fine,” he said robotically. “Nothing important.”

“Bucky, your arm is bleeding. _Profusely_ ,” replied Steve. 

Bucky shrugged. His blood was starting to roar in his ears, and his heart pounded out a desperate mantra: _Natasha. Help her. Natasha. Needs help. In danger. Natasha...Natalia_...

Steve growled, reaching into some magical pocket and producing a roll of bandage. “You people...” he grumbled to himself as he wrapped it tightly around the wound, which quickly stained the white material a dark, deep red. 

“Can we move now?” demanded Bucky. Without waiting for an answer, he hefted his gun up against his shoulder, took three steps forward, and kicked the nearest door in.

It slammed forward and against the floor with a very loud, echoing noise. A stairwell, apparently. Noting the number to the side of the door -- _fifteen_ \-- Bucky swore loudly in Russian, clattering down the stairs with Steve close on his heels.

Three floors and barely a milisecond later, Bucky broke another door, slamming it inward to find utter chaos.

The remaining HYDRA agents, once Bucky had torn apart the the building with gunfire, had retreated to the lower floors. They’d only gotten so far before Nat and Clint and Thor had found them, but these were _supersoldiers_. Not like Steve, but ruthless and cruel, with the attachments to their bodies that Hill had mentioned, filled with what was apparently Extremis serum. 

It took Bucky a moment to process what was happening. Clint was slumped unconscious against the wall, with Thor standing in front of him, swinging Mjolnir and looking utterly exhausted. And Bucky soon saw why: these men didn’t stop when the hammer slammed into them -- instead whatever had been harmed glowed orange and healed completely. 

Natasha was identifiable by a streak of bright red hair in a corner by herself, surrounded by soldiers, looking like she was desperate and fighting back despair with increasing difficulty. Very few of the men were down -- and the ones that were seemed to have their skulls bashed in only. 

So, of course, Bucky raised the barrel of his gun and spat bullets with unnering accuracy, into heads only because that was clearly the only way to fully disable these guys. Within minutes, Bucky stood with a nearly-empty gun hanging by his side and a bunch of dead HYDRA agents surrounding the stunned and extremely grateful Natasha and Thor. 

The redhaired assassin got up from where she was crouching by a fallen HYDRA agent, finding a lack of pulse, and turned over to Thor. “We have a few more floors to clear. But let’s check these bodies first.”

They all fell into a slow routine, moving around the room and checking pulses, finding all of them dead. Natasha moved close enough to Bucky to speak quietly, at which point she said, “How’d you get here so fast?”

Bucky shrugged. “Threw myself off the roof.”

Nat glanced at Steve. “Use his weight? Shield as a balance for direction?”

He nodded. They had used similar tactics when they had belonged to the Red Room. 

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For coming quickly.”

“Anything to help,” he replied. 

They cleared the bottom floors within the half hour, blowing the buliding from a safe distance not much later. They reached the Tower within the next few hours, and they all wandered off -- Steve to report with Tony, the rest of them to change into normal clothes and remind themselves what real living was.

Bucky wandered into the flat he shared with Steve, pulling off his leather armor with a detatched air. It was blood-spattered in only a few places -- a new thing for him. He always used to come back with blood soaking him.

Of course, this was usually figurative, but still.

With a sigh, he pulled on sweats and a too-big hoodie, pulling his hair into a bun (Natasha had taught him how to do it properly) and carefully stepped, in bare feet, out into the main room. 

Natasha, Clint (who had woken up with a nasty headache a little while into the flight), Thor, Sam, Steve, and Tony were all ranged around the couches. The TV was blaring _The Lord of the Rings_ , and everybody just looked tired. 

Bucky collapsed onto the couch next to Steve, glad that he wasn’t the only one who felt like everything was a little surreal. 


	8. Chapter 8

Steve was happy.

Today was a good day. So many ideas had been suggested to help Bucky’s stress levels, and Bucky had _finally_ , after a few recent anxiety attacks, had agreed to do some of them. 

Bucky wandered into the room, a pencil stuck into his hair and a sketchbook stuffed underneath one arm. He was splattered in paint flecks, but he looked very peaceful. 

One of the suggestions had been to take up an art class -- Bucky had reluctantly tried it, complaining that it was more Steve’s thing, and had apparently found that he loved it. He now wandered around with a camera around his neck a lot of the time, because he also liked to take abstract and artsy photographs. He found it was easier to take quick pictures and draw or paint them later.

“Hey, Buck,” called Steve from where he was reading. 

Bucky responded with, “You got another stress-relief idea?”

Steve grimaced. The assassin had recognized the tone of voice. “Tony’s still working on a personalized flight suit for you,” he pointed out. “I figured --”

“Okay, let’s hear it,” replied Bucky, sitting on the couch next to Steve, looking slightly resigned.

“Sam suggested a dog,” Steve blurted. 

“A dog,” replied Bucky, sounding a little disbelieving.

“Yes,” Steve insisted. “I think it could be good, Bucky, like a therapy dog --”

“I don’t want a trained dog,” Bucky interrupted. “If I’m gonna have a dog, I wanta train it myself.”

Ten minutes later, they were at the pet store, seeing the cages of dogs along the walls. Most of them were already claimed -- almost all of them were mutts.

Bucky’s hands were in his pockets, and he passed by most of the dogs without comment. Steve watched him carefully, and was surprised that when they reached the back of the room, Bucky’s eyes lit up.

He was looking into a cage that held a German shepherd and black lab mix, possibly with some pointer or something in her. She was staring up at Bucky with adoring brown eyes, panting happily at having been noticed.

One of the clerks noticed that the dog was staring at Bucky, and the assassin was staring right back at her, and the woman came over. “She’s one of the few not claimed already,” she informed Steve, because Bucky was busy crouching and introducing himself to the dog in low tones. “I think they’re a good match.”

Bucky turned at those words and stared at Steve with puppy eyes that rivalled the dog’s, and with a sigh the supersoldier wandered around the store, finding food, dishes, a leash, and a collar, as well as some toys. Within twenty minutes, they were walking back to the Tower with Bucky’s new dog sniffing around them excitedly. 

“I’m going to call her Star,” announced Bucky happily as they went up to the penthouse. 

Appoximately four minutes later, Tony came barreling out of his lab, yelling, _“You brought a WHAT in here?”_

“A _DOG_!” shouted Bucky in reply. “My dog.”

“You -- have a dog,” Tony stated, but it was more of a question. 

“Yep.”

“My idea, dude,” called Sam from where he was lounging on the couch. 

“Clint has a dog named Lucky,” Natasha commented quietly from where she was scratching Star’s ears. “And Bruce has like five cats in his flat, didn’t you know?”

“Where’s Clint’s dog?’ asked Bucky, curiously watching as Tony spluttered, looking like he was going to explode but unable to find the words.

“We have a -- mutual friend. Kate Bishop. She’s sometimes called the female Hawkeye -- just as good as he is, only better ‘cuz she’s female and doesn’t get wrapped up in this Avengers stuff.” Nat waved her hand at the apartment. “Or, at least, that’s what she thinks. Only, she’s coming here _now_ , since SHIELD’s down -- she just got hung up with a few things along the way. One of those things was picking up Clint’s dog. She should be coming real soon -- today, actually.”

“SHIELD’s not down,” commented Steve. “Hill said Coulson’s rebuilding.”

“From scratch. How long d’you think that’s gonna take?” commented Pepper, coming in with a full pot of coffee.

Steve acknowledged this with a shrug, and just then, the elevator opened. A pretty woman with wavy brown hair past her shoulders, full red lips, and clever (almost warm) dark brown eyes that stood out against her pale skin appeared from the elevator doors. She was a full head shorter than Steve, with wearing all dark clothing with archery armguards on the insides of both wrists. A loaded crossbow hung from her left hand, a quiver was slung over the thin jacket she wore, and a purple leash lead from her right fist back into the elevator. “Come, Lucky,” she ordered in a soft voice.

“I assume this is Kate?” Steve murmured to Natasha. 

With a sigh, the redhead nodded. “She and Barton were trained together -- they’re practically siblings.”

Lucky came bounding towards Star. He was a yellow lab, clearly, although his coloring leaned towards the darker end of the spectrum. His tail was whipping back and forth with enough force to make him fly away, which made. Star leaned away from him at first, her tail jerking back and forth a little reluctantly as Lucky enthusiastically greeted her.

Clint soon came in, and within minutes was reduced to lying on the floor with Lucky slathering his entire face and neck with dog slobber. 

Twenty minutes later, the entire group of them -- eleven in all, wow -- including the dogs were settled in the living room. Tony was standing on the coffee table, trying desperately to explain why he had a “no pets” rule, but since Bruce’s cats (of which there were three) were now joining the dogs in playing on the floor, this was not terribly well-received. 

“Star is mine,” insisted Bucky, scratching her ears while her tail thumped against his foot. “She’s staying. Sam says it’s good for stress.”

“And Lucky saved my life the first time I met him,” Clint chipped in. “He stays, too.”

“Don’t even try to tell me to get rid of the cats,” said Bruce, holding his hand up, palm out, when Tony turned to him. “They’re good for my blood pressure, and clearly they’re not disruptive if I’ve been able to keep them in my flat without _any_ of you noticing.”

Steve smiled at them. Tony wasn’t going to kick any of the pets out. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Natasha lean over to Pepper and say quietly, “Why is he standing on the table?”

“He likes to be tall,” replied Pepper. Which made Steve laugh.

“I like these beasts!” proclaimed Thor happily, stroking a very excited Lucky. At which point Clint enthusiastically turned around and, with Bucky’s help, began outlining the finer points of canine ability and skill.


	9. Chapter 9

Bucky was woken up the next morning by a very enthusiastic German shepherd mutt practically attacking him, her pointed ears perked up as if to literally _ask_ for food.

With a chuckle and a quiet sigh, Bucky carefully extricated himself from Steve’s grip and got up. Tony had finally gotten around to building other flats for their influx of people -- Thor’s girlfriend Jane had joined them, and some geeky kid named Peter was coming real soon.

Despite the new room additions, Bucky had requested Tony to _not_ build him one of his own. Sharing with Steve was perfect in his view. Steve was the only one who could keep the nightmares away. He liked this lull in activity -- so far, the team had only had day-long missions, no overnights, and for awhile, they were clear to just hang. 

This meant that Steve was always there. It was like -- after so long being so cold, both of them needed to find warmth in the other. There was something about the way Bucky was _allowed_ to curl around Steve like a koala, something about the warmth and the sense of peace that came from it, that made Bucky dread ever having to sleep in a different bed (or worse, a different _room_ ) than Steve.

Despite everything that Bucky could remember, neither of them had made any move to progress the slightly-more-than-platonic relationship that they currently shared. It frustrated Bucky, but at the same time, he was content to wait until Steve was ready to broach the topic. Steve, however, appeared to not remember it -- which was bizarre, because at this point, even Bucky could. 

Shaking off his thoughts, Bucky changed into loose exercise pants and a hoodie, then walked out into the kitchen, trailing a dog. Star panted at her bowl, which was next to Lucky’s. Pouring a healthy cupful of kibble into the bowl, Bucky hoisted himself onto the counter and idly sat, waiting for the dog to finish. 

When she did, he pulled his shoes on, clipped the leash onto her collar, and went out for a jog.

New York was never quiet. There were always people, was always noise, always traffic. But today was fairly still -- mist rested heavily like a blanket over the city, swirling as Bucky jogged along with Star. 

His dog tags swung and bounced against his chest as he ran, his feet hitting the sidewalk very quietly. He began to hear voices behind him, and he stopped to give Star a rest -- she was panting heavily -- and listened.

They were Girl Scouts. And they were chattering excitedly.

The first one said, “But we _should_ go to Avengers Tower, there are lots of people there!”

“It’s not like they can order anymore,” muttered another. “We’re basically just saying, ‘Here, have some cookies, pay some money, bye!’ That’s not how it _usually_ works.”

“The council changed the rules, I’m not complaining, it means more money,” replied the final girl. “Now shut up, Penny, Alyssa was talking.”

They must’ve been thirteen, Bucky decided, listening as they walked and talked.

“We should go to the Tower,” insisted the girl named Alyssa. “I’m absolutely positive that the Avengers like cookies, because who doesn’t?”

Penny snorted. “Yeah, but it’s a little early in the morning, dontcha think? Lily, back me up here.”

Lily must have shrugged, because there was no reply, and Penny sighed frustratedly.

“So can we go to the Tower?” asked Alyssa excitedly.

“Yes, but later.” That was Lily, who was apparently in charge. 

They disappeared into the mist, and Bucky quietly called, “Hey, Star.” The dog turned, and they jogged back to the Tower. 

Now quite wet, Bucky walked into the penthouse to find most of the others up and in the kitchen. With a swipe of his flesh hand, Bucky brought up JARVIS’s security detail and said quietly, “Hey, JARVIS, we’re gonna have some visitors within the next two hours.”

“Yes, sir. Who will be visiting?” asked JARVIS’s consistently calm voice. 

“Three little girls,” replied Bucky. 

“You turning pedo, Barnes?” asked Tony from the kitchen. 

Bucky sighed. The entire group was clearly very curious. “Three Girl Scouts are coming to sell cookies to the whole Tower,” he informed them. 

Which, of course, resulted in a lot of excitement and an absurd amount of cheering. The entire team was soon waiting anxiously for the girls to arrive. 

JARVIS finally said, “Sir, three young women have entered the building and are on their way up.”

This resulted in more cheering, and th elevator _dinged_ its way open. Three girls stepped out, and Bucky’s earlier assumption had been right -- they were about thirteen. One of them opened her mouth to say something, but her eyes widened as she saw the _entire_ population of the Tower around them: Bucky, Steve, Tony, Bruce, Natasha, Clint, Thor, Jane, Pepper, Kate, Sam, and Rhodey, the two dogs Star and Lucky, and three cats that twined their way between Bruce’s legs.

“H-hi?” tried the girl whose voice Bucky recognized as Alyssa. She held out the boxes in her arms. “We have extra girl scout cookies from this year and --”

“ -- We came to see if you’d like to buy some,” Lily finished, smiling sweetly. Penny smiled, too, looking much recovered from her surliness earlier that morning. Bucky decided that perhaps she had been nervous about meeting the Avengers team.

There was a brief pause, and then Tony said, “We’d _love_ some cookies,” in a very heartfelt manner. With that, the entire team, began requesting entire cases of cookies, many different types. 

Bucky was surprised when Alyssa came up to him, and held out the list of cookies. “I called my mom and she has an entire van of extra cookies on the way,” she told him brightly, grinning with a full mouth of braces -- something that for some reason, endeared her majorly to Bucky. “D’you want some?”

Before Bucky could reply, Star bounded over and practically tackled the girl, wanting to say hello. Alyssa giggled, successfully pushing the dog away. “Sure, I’ll take some cookies,” Bucky replied. He placed an order for a lot of different kinds, wanting to try them all -- except for one that Alyssa warned him had shitake mushrooms in them and smelled like bananas gone bad. 

Fifteen minutes later, after paying (with Stark’s money) for all their cookies, they brought the girls into the kitchen to wait for the girls’ parents to bring along the van of cookies they’d ordered. 

The three were very excited about the dogs -- they hadn’t been aware that the Avengers had had pets. This made Tony grunt frustratedly, and made Bucky and Clint laugh very loud. 

Ten minutes into the visit of the three teenage girls, and the elevator _dinged_ open again. Fully expecting the girls’ parents with cookie delivery, the whole team leaped up, yelling, although Bucky noticed that Alyssa looked confused, shooting a glance at the clock on her phone before shrugging at herself.

Out of the elevator stepped a tall, kind of gangly teenage boy, looking to be about nineteen or so. He had light brown hair that stuck up in the front, those nerdy glasses on the bridge of his nose, and he slouched his shoulders forward a little as he moved. _He’s that type_ , Bucky realized. _That exact cute nerdy type that everyone really likes these days_.

The whole team stared at him for awhile before Clint muttered, “You don’t have cookies,” and slouched back to the kitchen looking dejected. 

The kid swallowed. “I’m Peter,” he said quietly. “Peter Parker.”

“Oh yeah, kid, we were waiting for you,” Tony said enthusiastically. “We’re gonna need you in the lab, Bruce and I, we gotta draw up some specs on that sticky thing you can do --”

“What sticky thing?” asked Natasha curiously.

Peter grinned rather mischeviously and suddenly jumped about ten feet in the air and backwards. Bucky fully expected him to fall (how could he jump that high, anyway?) but his jaw dropped as the kid pressed his hands flat against the wall and _stuck_. With just them and the balls of his feet.

“How did you learn to do _that_?” demanded Bucky as the kid released his grip and fell back to the floor, landing in a crouch and straightening.

“Bit by a spider,” he replied. “Radioactive.”

Bucky backed up just a bit then, and Star apparently recognized that something was off, because she stepped between him and Peter and snarled. _“Spider?”_ demanded Bucky, his voice going a little higher.

“I’m Spiderman,” replied the kid, shrugging nonchalantly.

_Holy hell, I hate spiders_ , Bucky thought frantically. _Keep your cool_ , he ordered himself. _He’s not a spider -- all he can do is stick_.

“What else can you do?” asked Tash as a distraction, casting a concerned look at Bucky.

Peter flicked his arm, making his hand into a funny shape and -- suddenly, a length of web sprang from the inside of his wrist. 

“Oh, for the love of --” Bucky put the back of his hand to his mouth to keep from spewing profanities in front of three thirteen-year-old girls. 

Peter was now eyeing him very curiously, but Tony and Bruce distracted him by demanding answers about how he could shoot webs. Peter replied that he had invented these little shooter things -- they held long lengths of web. He had gotten the idea because he was _Spiderman_ , might as well have some web, which was conveniently very strong and useful. 

“Okay, kid, you’re geek enough for us,” declared Tony. “You _made_ your own spinnerets because you didn’t -- because sticking wasn’t enough? That’s beyond cool.”

Bucky didn’t think so. 

Tony and Bruce led Peter away towards their lab with instructions over their shoulders to bring their cookies down upon delivery. 

“You okay, Buck?” asked Steve quietly as the rest of the team trickled back into the kitchen.

Bucky nodded, realizing with horror that his fingers were shaking. “You know I hate spiders, Steve,” he muttered.

Unfortunately, Clint heard that comment, and that meant the whole team learned it within the next moment: “You’re scared of _spiders_?”

Bucky winced, rubbing his forehead. “A little,” he grudgingly admitted.

“But -- but you’re an _assassin_ ,” said Clint, looking baffled. “Like me and Tash and Kate. _How_ can you be scared of spiders?”

“Everyone’s scared of something,” Natasha pointed out quietly. 

The conversation tapered off, and Bucky slowly recovered. _Spider guy_ , he thought frustratedly, rubbing Star’s back and smiling slightly at her dog-grin. _Why spiders? Why not...why not puppy-guy, or something cool? Spiders. Eurgh_. 


	10. Chapter 10

It had been a few weeks since the incident with the Girl Scout cookies. There were still about three hundred boxes littered around the Tower, most of them partially empty.

Of course, it had been difficult to continue finishing them off when part of their team had gone.

Thor and Jane had left, going back to Asgard or something. Probably not coming back at all, and if they did, it would be _very_ temporary. Rhodey had gone back into his military job, to Tony’s frustration. 

Pepper was still _there_ , but she had re-embraced her CEO position and was no longer going to be around the Tower very often. 

That left nine of them, still more than the original team. 

Steve sighed, swirling his coffee as he sat at the desk in his and Bucky’s still-shared room. He smiled to himself as he heard soft, slightly off-key singing coming from the direction of the shower, where Bucky was. 

There was a very loud thump, and suddenly the singing turned into very loud swearing, in an interesting mixture of Russian and English, all of which Steve understood with his newfound knowledge of the odd language.

Five minutes later, the assassin came out wearing just a towel looking a little grumpy and limping a bit. “I dropped shampoo on my foot,” he growled by way of explanation, and Steve started laughing so hard he fell over. 

“What?” demanded Bucky, but the supersoldier was suffering from aftershocks of laughter and couldn’t reply. Looking grumpier than ever, Bucky wandered away and got dressed. Steve, mostly recovered, tried to keep his eyes off his old friend -- and failed. He had avoided talking about his and Bucky’s previous relationship for as long as possible, thinking maybe that Bucky couldn’t remember, since the assassin didn’t bring it up either. He wondered how one could forget that, especially when he had remembered nearly everything else.

Bucky turned, apparently noticing Steve’s gaze on him, and blushed. “What?” he asked again.

_Better late than never_. “Buck, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”

Bucky looked quizzical, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Okay,” he replied, confused but indicating that he should continue.

Steve sighed. “How much,” -- he cleared his throat -- “how much do you remember about us? Before the war, before everything?”

Steve had thought that he was incredibly unclear, and was stunned when Bucky’s face lit up. “Oh! I -- everything,” he replied, his dark eyes searching Steve’s face, looking for...something.

“Everything?” repeated Steve.

Bucky sighed, almost impatiently, before standing and walking over. He crouched by where Steve was sitting -- something that had usually been reversed this past while. “Yes, everything. Including this.” He leaned forward, and Steve just had time to inhale sharply before Bucky’s lips met his. 

It was seventy years of lost time packed into a single moment -- needy and desperate, yet managing to remain soft and sweet. Steve wondered hazily why he had waited so long to bring it up.

Bucky pulled back, smiling softly. “I wondered -- if you had forgotten,” he said quietly. “I wanted to wait until you brought it up, in case I was making things up --”

“I didn’t forget,” Steve replied, smiling and thinking he was a fool. “I thought _you_ had.”

Bucky chuckled, running a hand through his hair. “We’re still both damn idiots.”

“Always,” replied Steve, and something about his tone made Bucky’s eyes suddenly become a lot darker, and Steve only had a moment’s breath before he was tackled to the floor.

 

Steve was first out the next morning of the two of them, although he was about an hour behind the rest of the team. Apparently, they all thought he was a blushing virgin of some sort, judging by their reactions when he appeared.

Of course, he _was_ wearing just a bathrobe that was half-off one shoulder, displaying his throat and chest -- and he knew full well that he was bruised and ravaged from his throat to his hips.

Kate choked on her coffee and Peter turned an interesting shade of red. Clint grumpily handed a crumpled bill to a widely-grinning Sam. Bruce stared pointedly at his coffee, Tony for once looked lost for words, and Natasha was smiling at her breakfast like she had foretold something to it and had it come true.

There were footsteps behind him, and Bucky came in -- looking about 200 times worse than Steve did.

There was a very pregnant pause, and then Tony sighed, “You could try to be less obvious.”

Steve shrugged, picking up a bagel and tossing it across the kitchen to Bucky, who deftly caught it with his metal arm and began crunching on it, paying no heed to the lack of cream cheese on it. Although that was how he usually liked his bagels, old habits died hard -- being poor in Brooklyn meant eating a lot of interesting combinations of food just to stay nourished. “I’m not sure we really need to be. I had enough of hiding back in the old days, didn’t you, Buck?”

Bucky nodded emphatically, and from most of the team’s expressions, a lot of them felt kind of guilty. Steve felt good, though, better than he had in awhile. 

 

Later that week, Steve watched impassively as Bucky talked to Tony. “You know, it’s been confusing me for awhile, man,” the assassin was saying. “It’s like -- it’s hooked into my neural system. I can feel it, and it used to hurt whenever they worked on it while it was attached to me. But, it doesn’t hurt when I take it off. Can you -- I dunno -- look at it? Maybe use whatever you can find to make more useful prosthetics?”

Tony looked like Christmas had come early. “Yeah,” he said. “Although I’m gonna need it for an extended period of time -- a week, at least, maybe a few days more.”

Bucky shrugged and nonchalantly detached the arm, handing it across to Tony. “Okay.”

Tony’s eyes bulged a bit, and he reached for the metal arm, but Bucky pulled it back really quick.

“You gotta to promise not to break it. This arm is part of me now, an’ I’m not gonna have you messin’ it up.”

Tony nodded vigorously, and snatched the arm when Bucky held it out again. Then he all but ran down to the lab where Peter and Bruce already were, and Steve sighed. “We won’t be seeing him for a good week.”

“Mhm,” agreed Bucky thoughtfully. 

“What’re you gonna do with only one arm?” asked Steve.

“Not much.” And so Bucky grinned wickedly, collapsing on the couch and ordering, “Steve, get me some coffee.”

For the rest of the week, Bucky used his amputee status as an excuse to get Steve to do everything for him. Steve knew he was being played, but he did it anyway, because it amused Bucky to order him around the Tower. It amused the others, too. The only scientist who came up from the lab was Peter, and then only around mealtimes to get things for the other two. None of them came up to sleep, and Peter refused to divulge anything that they were doing.

Steve was happy to make Bucky coffee and cook for him, get him books, turn up the heat (it was starting to snow out lately), anything. Usually, Bucky wouldn’t accept help, even for two-man jobs, so it was kind of nice to be allowed to help, even if Bucky was milking it.

On the last night before Peter promised Bucky could have his arm back, Bucky was situated on the couch, his head in Steve’s lap. “Steeeeve,” he whined, batting at Steve’s arm with his hand. 

“Yes, Bucky?” asked Steve patiently, twining one of his hands further into Bucky’s hair.

“Change the channel,” pleaded the assassin. 

Steve raised an eyebrow. The remote was exactly between Bucky’s hand and his, easily within reaching distance of Buck’s one hand. With a sigh, Steve lifted it and changed the channel for him, causing Bucky to squirm happily as he scratched the assassin’s scalp.

The arm was given back without much preamble, and Tony shrugged and said, “We drew up some specs, it’s clear that they hooked it directly into your neural system, we’re just not sure _how_ , exactly. That’s the only thing holding us back from recreating it, though, and we won’t need the arm itself for any further analysis.”

Bucky hooked it back onto his shoulder, and life was back to normal. 


	11. Chapter 11

In early November that year (really, not even a full week later), Bucky was given a nerf gun.

The assassin was considerably excited about this, having never seen nor heard of a nerf gun ever before. Finding the gift from Clint on the bed with thirty ( _thirty_ ) full sets of bullets, a near-perfect sniper-rifle made into a harmless toy, Bucky couldn’t speak around grinning from ear to ear. 

Popping one set of bullets in and changing into dark clothes, he stored all the other cases of bullets on his person in various hiding locations. Then, he snuck out of the room before Steve even woke up, as it was about four in the morning.

He knew Tony, Bruce, and Peter were still in the lab, taking turns sleeping as the scienced, trying to figure out how Bucky’s arm worked. Deciding to interrupt them, Bucky snuck silently down the stairs, hacked his way into the door system after a swift pleading session with JARVIS, and the door opened -- revealing an empty doorway. Bucky cackled silently in his spot above the doorway as Tony came out, frowning. Then _pow_ \-- nerf bullet straight to the forehead, and Bucky dodged past him, scooping up the used bullet and sprinting through the lab, landing well-placed shots in sensitive areas around the large room. He was careful not to scare Bruce, diving past him and into the heating duct, not wanting to awaken the Hulk.

_“Goddammit, Barnes!”_ came Tony’s voice as Bucky moved through the heating ducts. 

When he found Natasha, she was half-asleep on the couch watching some reality show -- with a single shot, he had her whipping around with a real gun in her hands. Yelping, Bucky ducked and rolled out of the air duct, holding his hands up with the gun in one of them. “Hey,” he said quietly.

She lowered the gun, sighing. “You idiot. You found Clint’s present, then?”

Bucky smiled broadly. “It’s great. Want to join me?”

She smiled too, producing her own two different types of slightly smaller (more compact) guns, one of them a pistol, and case upon case of bullets. “Oh, yeah.” 

They teamed up, to the unmitigated horror of everybody else. No space was sacred, and no one was safe. By four o’clock, everywhere had been hit, but nobody had seen either Bucky or Natasha for _hours_. Almost every bullet had come out of a heating shaft, so the popular theory was that the two of them had taken to the ventilation system.

Natasha and Bucky had left a large note in the kitchen after a three hours of warning shots. It said, _We will hit you until you surrender, at which point we’ll lock you in a room. Once everyone surrenders, we’ll come out. There is no way to beat us, for we will not surrender even if you manage to find nerf weapons with which to try. Fight as long as you wish -- it is futile._

Not long after, Bruce, Tony, and Peter had retreated to the lab and surrendered.

Bucky settled into position, heard Tash whisper in his ear with such feather-soft words that she was just breathing them, and if he had been about an inch further away he would have heard her. She breathed, “We’ve locked the lab rats in. Kate, Clint, and Steve are the only ones who haven’t surrendered.”

“Where’s Sam again?” he breathed back.

“Out with Rhodey for a couple weeks. He left at three this morning. Anyway, Steve is in your guys’ room. When he surrenders, we’ll lock him in. Kate and Clint will be the hardest to subdue -- they’re probably tracking us right now.”

Bucky nodded, lining up his shot at Steve’s unsuspecting head. Then, he inhaled -- squeezed the trigger -- exhaled with the gun as it spat its bullet from the shaft into the room.

Steve yelled in surprise, and Bucky heard a strangled, “Fine, I surrender!”

Fist-bumping the air in triumph, Bucky signalled for Tash to lock the room. She did so, and off they snuck. 

They reached the living room, and found Clint and Kate standing back to back in the center, rotating slowly in the center of the room. They were each holding nerf weapons, Kate a crossbow and Clint a compound bow.

Natasha breathed in his ear again. “Kate will take longer for you to subdue than Clint.”

That was all Bucky needed. He waited for her to move to a vent across the room -- then he immediately began an onslaught of bullets raining on Clint only. Natasha was attacking Kate with more force, because it only took Bucky three consecutive sets of bullets before Clint backed into a closet, kicked his bow away from him, and shouted, “I surrender!”

He had been unable to even find a target from Bucky’s vantage point, and so he gave up.

Bucky grinned, whispering, “JARVIS, lock that door.”

“As you wish, sir.”

The door shut and locked, and Natasha ceased her onslaught of Kate. The Knightress, as she was called, straightened up, breathing hard. “Am I the last one?” she demanded.

Bucky answered. “Yes.”

With a sigh, Kate lowered her bow to the floor, savagely kicked it across the room, and backed into the nearest room that was able to be closed off. “I surrender.”

“Lock that door, JARVIS!” ordered Bucky.

“Yes, sir.”

The door clicked locked, and the two assassins leaped from their hiding places. “They would have made good allies,” observed Bucky, referring to Clint and Kate.

Natasha nodded, agreeing. “We won!” she exclaimed happily. 

Bucky grinned. “We sure did.”


	12. Chapter 12

The building was still recovering from the nerf gun incident. 

Steve had surrendered only after trying to hide from the assassins, before he realized it was futile. The two of them were just too good, using the ventilation system to move around. 

Their next mission came as a surprise: a video call on the kitchen screen while they were eating breakfast, and a very familiar face was there.

_“Coulson!”_ shouted Tony, jumping forward at the screen.

The agent replied with a huge grin. “Hello, Avengers. I’m sorry about the confusion regarding my death, I was only recently informed of the truth myself.” His face twisted in annoyance and what appeared to be a little bit of fear.

Suddenly, the camera zoomed out with a loud yelp from someone, and suddenly the Avengers could see an entire group of people. Steve immediately recognized all of them as the specialized team that Hill had introduced to them. The girl, Skye, was laughing in front of a laptop as Coulson turned to look at her. “Skye,” he said exasperatedly as she shrugged.

“Thought they ought to see all of us,” she said. “And I’ve always wanted to meet the Avengers.”

“What’s up, Coulson?” asked Steve, getting to the point.

“We have three powerful hostiles near New York. Escapees from the Fridge when Garrett stormed it. Most others have been dealt with by my team -- this is the last group, and my team has business elsewhere. We need you to deal with it.”

“Got it,” Steve replied, already standing. 

Coulson continued speaking, detailing the unnatural powers of these people -- an interesting amount of extra strength on one, a couple extra limbs on another, an excess amount of gooey mucus on the body of the last one -- and explaining what they had to do. “I’m sorry to force this on you, but utter destruction is necessary. We have no containment unit for these guys. Also, a warning -- the one with the extra strength, he’s got an army of robot people.” When Tony gave him a look, Coulson just shrugged. “Hey, he had a friend we took out awhile ago, who was telekinetically good with technology.”

Steve sighed. “We’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks. We’ll be in touch.” The screen winked out.

Everybody ran to get suited up, nobody deciding to talk about Coulson and his team’s sudden appearance, at least until later. 

 

The quinjet was soaring above the street where, with some help from the police, they had evacuated. In it, quarantined the baddies and their army. 

Clint and Kate were stationed together on one roof, Bucky on another. Natasha was flying in the jet, rather grudgingly. She had badly injured her leg the day after the nerf gun incident, spraining her knee by twisting it as she tripped over a stray nerf arrow on the stairs, left by Clint.

Tony, Bruce (now the Hulk), and Steve were on the street, fighting. There was one of them for each of the escaped prisoners, although the Hulk had quickly dispatched his, the one with nothing special but a few extra limbs. Tony had already annihilated the gooey one. Peter was swinging from the roofs, working on the army. 

The supersoldier threw his shield, smacking the one with superstrength. It was refreshing to fight someone with as much strength as him, just as it had been to fight Bucky. Although, Bucky had been saddening, fighting his old friend. This was just satisfying. 

Suddenly, there was a spray of bullets around him, and the man with superstrength crumpled as he was peppered with holes.

Steve crouched, checked his pulse. He was very dead. 

Pushing aside his regret for a better, later time, the supersoldier turned, looking up at the roofs of the buildings. The rain of bullets began again as he stared up, and he looked around, seeing every guy in the robot army being gunned down before they could get within five feet of him.

Steve looked up again. “Let me hit _someone_ , Bucky!” he shouted, hiding his grin. _Back to his old protective boyfriend self_.

He could feel the reluctance, and Bucky’s voice sounded in his ear through the earpiece: “You didn’t need to shout.” The bullets slowed a little.

“Hey, thanks.”

“No problem. Go get ‘em, punk.”

Steve grinned, then threw himself into the fray, hoping to get this over with soon. 


	13. Chapter 13

Bucky sighed, staring at the screen that Coulson was on, thanking them. _Steve doesn’t need my help anymore_. But that was okay, after all, Bucky had kind of gotten used to that in the fighting during the war. 

Still, he was in a mood by the time Coulson was done. Without waiting for Steve, he snuck off to their room, changed into loose exercise clothes, and crept down to the gym.

Natasha was there. 

Sparring was a great way to pass the time, and at that moment, Bucky wanted nothing more than to feel the jar of flesh against his fist, although he knew deep down that if she didn’t want him to, he’d never touch her. 

She saw his intentions on his face as he walked in, and she smiled that little smile that showed nothing, her eyes like a lake he could not see to the bottom of. “You first,” she said quietly as he stepped onto the mat.

He needed no more urging and swung his flesh fist at her. He moved to use his metal hand to just pin instead of hit, to keep it from hurting her. But he missed completely. Well, he didn’t miss -- she dodged.

The fight progressed, but it was less of a fight than Nat dodging like smoke, landing small, annoying, bruises of blows all over his body, him not even landing a single blow on her. His frustration was building high, and he deliberately swung his fist further than was wise in the hopes of hitting her, opening his torso up to any attack she wanted. He knew what he had done a split-second later, knew the fight was over and braced himself to end up on the floor with her thighs around his neck.

Instead, she slipped up under his guard and -- tickled him, under his shoulder, exactly where it always made him collapse in fits.

And he did, rolling around in laughter as she giggled above him, the two of them moving into what was now playfighting like children, and he realized that all of his tension and frustration had fled like shadows before a light. He watched her when they finally calmed down enough to sit, aftershocks of laughter shaking their frames as they stayed still. She looked more carefree than ever before, the shutters behind her eyes open the widest that Bucky had ever seen them except when she was with Clint.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

She smiled softly. “You’re welcome.” There was a pause, and then she jutted her chin towards the door of the room. “Captain Handsome awaits you.”

Bucky turned and saw Steve framed in the doorway, leaning against it, smiling at him. The assassin turned back to Tash for just a moment, only to find her gone, like a ghost. Frowning just slightly, Bucky heaved himself to his feet and walked over to Steve.

“I noticed you were irritated,” Steve said when Bucky neared him. “So I asked Tash to come down and fight with you. I might have told her where you’re most ticklish.”

“Hey, thanks,” said Bucky, chuckling. “Sometimes you know me better than I do.”

“You’re welcome.” Bucky felt Steve’s hand against the small of his back, leading him out, feeling peaceful.

 

Bucky woke up, feeling a tickling on his neck. “Steve, stoppit,” he murmured, swatting lazily at his boyfriend’s arm. 

Which was halfway across the bed, nowhere near his neck.

Suddenly wide-awake, Bucky slowly reached a hand up to his throat, and felt something small and crawly. _Spider._ He fought down rising panic and the irrational urge to fling himself at Steve’s side of the bed. 

Then he felt a slight pinch, although he might have imagined it, and something was apparently biting him.

With a strangled scream, he sat straight up with the inhuman and jerky speed and strength of someone utterly panicking. He threw himself off the bed, swatting at his throat and knocking the spider off. He started stomping in a circle, unable to find the spider and crush it, screaming all the while.

Steve sat up, clearly disoriented, and looked around in the dim light. “Buck --” He caught sight of the assassin practically dancing in a circle, and his brow furrowed as a slight smirk fought its way across his face. “What are you doing?”

“Sp-sp- _spider_ ,” stammered Bucky.

Steve heaved himself up and moved over to where Bucky stood, wild-eyed and shaking a little. “It’s okay, Buck,” he said soothingly, rubbing the assassin’s back in slow, reassuring circles. “It’s gone now. It’s okay.”

Bucky began to calm down, and feel a little silly. “I’m afraid of spiders,” he muttered. “Real fear.”

“Not a phobia, though,” Steve commented, clearly thinking. “That would probably have triggered an anxiety attack. It’s probably just an acute, innate fear --”

His words were cut off with a throaty yell as Bucky threw himself onto Steve’s back, his metal arm curling around Steve’s shoulders while the other pointed frantically at a specific part of the floor. “Get it, get it, kill it!” he shouted in Steve’s ear.

“You’re an Avenger, you’re an _assassin_ , what’re you doing?” demanded Steve, but it was less of an admonishment and more of a light teasing as he located the spider and stomped on it, squishing it into the carpet, deftly killing it. 

Bucky’s entire form relaxed, and he slipped off of Steve, standing still next to the supersoldier and rubbing his shoulder in slight embarrassment. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” replied Steve, bending and lifting the dead creature by its leg, throwing it into the trash can from twenty feet away.

Bucky shivered. “I don’t like spiders.”

“Don’t let Peter hear you say that,” teased Steve. “I’ll kill all the spiders, okay?”

Bucky nodded, fully calming down. “Okay.”

 

The next day in the kitchen, Bucky was sitting and eating when Tony came in, wearing full-armor. 

Bucky raised his eyebrows as he slid a spoonful of yogurt with granola into his mouth. “What are you doing?” he asked around the yogurt as he plunked the spoon back into the bowl.

“I hereby challenge you to an arm wrestling contest, my metal arm against yours.”

Bucky snorted around another spoonful. “You only need your left arm of the suit for that. And why the sudden urge?”

“Dare from Barton,” replied the billionaire with the slightly tinny voice he took on when he spoke through the metal of the helmet. “Now come on, Natasha’s gonna refferee.” The redhead appeared out of nowhere, holding her phone for filming purposes and moving to stand at the head of the table.

With a sigh, Bucky pushed aside his bowl and Stark sat down across from him. They clenched hands, and it was a very odd picture -- Iron Man readying for an arm wrestle with the metal arm of a man with sleep-blurred blue eyes, a stained green T-shirt, sleep-mussed hair pulled back into a man-bun, and a bored expression, with a redhead wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt readying to film them.

“Go,” ordered Tash, and within seconds, Bucky slammed Tony’s arm against the table with enough force to dent the metal slightly.

“Ow!” yelped Tony, pulling his arm back and inspecting the suit, clenching and unclenching the fingers. 

“Bucky won,” said Tash lazily, sticking her finger into the other assassin’s bowl and licking off the yogurt, as a taste-test. “You lose, Stark.”

Tony, grumbling, demanded a rematch. And another. And another. Each time, Bucky’s metal arm smashed his suit’s against the table. Finally, the genius was forced to admit defeat, and he grouched off to find Clint and pay him twenty dollars. 

Bucky went back to his yogurt.

Natasha leaned over the table. “ _I_ hereby challenge you to a game of hide and seek.”

Bucky stared at her. “A two-person game? That’s kind of hard.”

“Not really. One person hides, the other person looks.”

Bucky shrugged. “Fine. Are you allowed to shift your hiding place?”

“Yes. I am.” Natasha darted towards the door, then paused and said, “In case you didn’t realize, I’m hiding. If you can’t find me by three in the afternoon, you’re making me dinner tonight, per whatever request I make of you.”

Bucky grimaced. “Challenge accepted,” he grunted. “You have a ten minute head start.”

She disappeared.

 

It was two thirty, and Bucky was officially irritated.

He had been searching since ten in the morning, and everytime he found a clue as to where she was -- a breath of perfume on the air here, a thumbprint on a door there, a loud sneeze at one point -- he could never find _her_. He had searched the air ducts, and he had been everywhere in the Tower, but her changing position made things difficult.

Finally, he broke down and whispered, “JARVIS?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you get a read on Natasha?”

A pause. “Miss Romanoff is currently moving through the air duct along the east of the second level. From her trajectory, she probably plans to end up in the kitchen at about five minutes before three o’clock, sir.”

Bucky grinned. “Thank you.”

He darted off to the kitchen and hid in a cupboard, curling himself in with the emptiness. There weren’t even any shelves -- Tony kept saying he was going to put them in, but it was kind of unnecessary, ecause there were already too many half-empty cupboards full of empty space.

Bucky heard footsteps and tensed. He recognized Natasha’s gait and burst out of the cupboard -- only to find empty space. Cursing, he checked his watch. It was two minutes of three.

He snapped softly, “JARVIS!”

The computer answered immediately. “Miss Romanoff is in the kitchen.”

Bucky stared around. “No she’s not.”

“Miss Romanoff is in the kitchen,” JARVIS said again.

Very, very slowly, Bucky looked up.

Splayed out in a corner of the freaking _ceiling_ hung Natasha Romanoff, grinning at him the like the spider that was her namesake. “Congrats, Barnes,” she said quietly. “You got me a minute before the bell.”

Bucky smiled widely and moved over to (albeit unnecessarily) help her down. Clearly she appreciated it, because she grinned wider back at him. “I’ll still make you dinner, though,” he offered.

She laughed. “Good, because I want your spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Your wish is my command,” he replied, already moving towards the fridge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last one for today. :( Unless I can finish chapter fourteen (which is freakin' important) today, that's it for the (my) summer. I'm so sorry, but if you're already here, I hope you liked all the stuffs.   
> I love you guys, I promise I'm not dead, I will be posting again. I'M ALWAYS HERE. Don't give up on me, I'll come back.  
> BYE GUYS!


	14. Chapter 14

Steve was good at video games. Like, freakishly good for a guy who’d been in ice when they were invented. 

Bucky was good at first person shooting games, and frankly, so was Steve. Neither of them liked playing such games, however, due to unpleasant memories and unburied ghosts. 

Mario Kart, however, was incredibly fun -- Bucky crashed about fifteen times in a row on his first try at the game, and after the sixteenth time threw the remote at a laughing Clint in disgust. He wasn’t _that_ bad, he just didn’t particularly enjoy it. Steve, however, was a natural at it, and he beat Clint and Sam almost every time.

Now, Bucky was curled on the corner of the couch, his feet pressing against Steve’s thigh as a counterbalance as he read a book propped up on his knees. Clint was on a different couch, and Sam was spreadeagled across a love seat, the controller out in front of him. Tony was watching from the bar on the side of the room with a bag of popcorn that he was sharing with Peter and Bruce, and Nat was leaning in the doorway, watching through her phone as she filmed them.

“Let’s see if you can beat us on Rainbow Road,” said Clint after an emotionally-charged race through Bowser’s Castle. 

Thirty seconds in, and both Clint and Sam were yelled again. _“HOW ARE YOU SO GOOD AT THIS, YOU WERE FROZEN WHEN IT CAME OUT!”_ screeched Clint as Steve nailed him with a backwards-aimed red shell.

_“DON’T SAY YOU’RE ON MY LEFT -- GODDAMMIT, I CAN SEE YOU PASSING ME!”_ shouted Sam in frustration as Steve quietly announced that he was on the soldier’s left.

“Was this track supposed to be hard?” asked Steve quietly as Clint’s car fell off the rainbow into open space.

_“IT’S THE HARDEST ONE EVER!”_ screamed Clint in frustration as he repeatedly slammed his thumb against the controller’s buttons in the hopes of speeding up the process of returning to the track.

“It looks kinda like what Thor said their bridge thing looked like. Their bifrost, and the one to the city,” Bucky commented, and there was a brief silence before everybody realized how true this was.

“Wow, I never realized that,” said Tony through a mouthful of popcorn.

Bucky rolled his eyes, and Steve chuckled to himself as he flew across the finish line, completing the race. There was an uproar of shouting from Clint and Sam, and Steve graciously skipped the trophy-awarding sequence. He was still in first, though, and that was galling to the men. 

Steve shrugged, tossing the remote aside and stretching with a yawn. “Time for bed, Bucky,” he said to the assassin. 

Bucky whined and pressed his cold bare feet further into Steve’s thigh. “Noooo,” he wailed as Steve scooped him up with ease and carried him to their rooms. 

“Come on, you didn’t sleep very much last night,” Steve coaxed him.

Bucky plucked at Steve’s sleeve with  a sullen expression. “I don’t like that you’re leaving. _Without_ me. Who’s gonna watch your back?”

Steve sighed. “Buck, Coulson says it’s a one-man mission.”

“I don’t care,” grumbled the assassin. “Nobody’s gonna be there to make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

Steve shrugged, which coincidentally made Bucky move up and down. There wasn’t much he could do to make Bucky stop worrying. He could only hope that nothing too catastrophic happened, because if it did, Bucky would fight tooth and nail to get himself on more “solo missions” like this one, or just sneak after him. 

That was a good plan. Too bad it went so horribly wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Kay, so, I lied -- if I finish chap 15, THAT will be the last chapter. I do still love you guys, though. :)


	15. Chapter 15

Bucky woke up the next morning to an empty bed.

He had anticipated it, but whenever he did, he curled himself into a ball and whimpered, squeezing his eyes shut tight and hiding from the monsters.

Steve always kept the monsters away, like sunlight on a shadow.

Still, Bucky heaved himself up and out into the kitchen. When he saw that everybody was there and that a couple of them were geared up for a battle, alarm bells went off and his entire body tensed up.

“What’s going on?” he asked quietly.

Natasha turned, the only one in the room that didn’t look marginally guilty. “You’re awake,” she said quietly. “We were hoping you weren’t.”

“Well, I am. What’s happening?”

The entire congregation exchanged glances. “Steve has been compromised,” replied the redheaded assassin, very quietly. 

Bucky’s vision tunneled and had to take a couple deep breaths to see straight again. “Compromised _how_?” he demanded as calmly as he could. 

Natasha looked hard at him, looking for a larger reaction. “We don’t know. Possibly, he’s been captured, but we’re not sure. The only reason we know he’s gone is because he didn’t send a message at the appropriate time, nor any since. And Coulson received an encrypted message that Skye decoded, but it’s still in some form of code. May and Skye are both working on it, but we’re all operating on the assumption that it’s a ransom.”

Bucky held himself very still, then turned and went back to his room. He reappeared in under a minute, fully dressed and combat-ready, leaning a sniper rifle against his shoulder. “Tony, I want you and JARVIS running something to find Steve’s last known location. Tell me where he was, what he was doing. Peter, get me mission stats -- Steve was cagey about this one and so was Coulson. I want to _know_. Bruce, once Tony’s got a known location, I want you to locate all known -- used or abandoned -- possible HYDRA bases there are there within a five-mile radius. If none pop up or none seem likely, expand the search. If it gets up to twenty-miles, shrink back down and look for other hostiles.”

The three of them nodded and darted down towards the lab. 

Bucky looked at the only two left, Tash and Clint. Natasha answered his unspoken question. “Sam’s out on patrol with Rhodey, and they’ve been notified. They’ve got people looking, but it’s a wide range, they can’t find his location. Kate’s still in medbay from her last stunt, we didn’t tell her or she’d want to go.”

Bucky nodded. “Thor?”

Clint shrugged. “He left a week ago.”

“Yeah, but he said he’d be back soon. He _and_ Jane.”

“You never know with Asgardians, man. He’ll probably show up halfway through the battle and save all our asses.”

Bucky grunted. “Let’s hope. _Anyone who isn’t suited up, get that way_!” he shouted to the general building. He knew the geeks would hear. Clint, of course, took off for his room.

Natasha pulled him aside. “James. You’re not yourself.”

He wrenched his arm away from her grip. “I’m fine,” he replied tersely.

“You’re not. You’re turning into _him_ again.”

That stopped him short. “I’m _what_?”

“You’re turning into the Winter Soldier again, James, and I can’t let you do that. Steve needs you, he needs Bucky, not a cold assassin. You’re not gonna help him any if you go after him acting like this, because when we get there, he’s gonna wonder who you are.”

Bucky winced. “Alright, Tash,” he said quietly. “Just -- tell me if I do it again, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, watching him a little sadly. 

 

Within minutes, Tony shouted for Bucky. The assassin went running and skidded to a stop to find Tony staring at a plasma screen, frowning. “JARVIS has a satellite hit, but it’s blurred and encrypted, like someone knocked it out of sync...” the genius muttered, typing furiously. 

Peter glanced up, switched keyboards, and entered a few lines of code on Tony’s screen. The picture cleared, and Peter switched back to his original keyboard without another look.

Tony cast him a look of grudging thanks. He didn’t like being showed up, but they were on a mission, and it _was_ a science bro. Bucky could almost see the wheels turning as Tony turned back to him. “He was in Chicago,” said Tony, sounding a bit bemused. “At a café... There are two pictures,” he said, separating them on the screen. “Each within thirty seconds of each other. First one -- there’s Steve.”

Bucky leaned in, seeing a small, kind of out-of-focus figure that definitely was Steve.

“And in the second one, no Steve.”

Bucky switched his gaze to the second picture and had to admit that Stark was absolutely right. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Bruce, what’ve you got for me? Stark, get your suit on.” The billionaire darted away, leaving the satellite photos up. 

Bruce looked up swiftly, then back down. “There are no known HYDRA bases within a five or ten mile radius of Chicago,” he said quietly. “JARVIS is circling more, although he insisted that he look for other hostiles as well.”

“Fine,” Bucky said, examining the computer screen. “It’s more likely to be a holdout of a HYDRA-affiliated group, but that’s okay.”

Less than two seconds later, a chiming noise rang throughout the lab and JARVIS announced, there are three known hostile locations within a twenty-mile radius of the café in Chicago, two of which are allegedly affiliated with the HYDRA organization.”

“Bruce, download those coordinates onto a thumbdrive for me and keep the program running on a handheld. Take it when we’re in the air. Just in case.” Bruce immediately sent about doing so. “Follow Stark, he’s going up to the quinjet, Barton and Natasha are already there,” added Bucky as he turned. “Peter! Talk to me, kid.”

Peter looked up from his screen long enough to shoot him a look of _really?_ before looking back down, his typing speed unimpaired despite the glance away. “Um. SHIELD was surprisingly easy to hack, but since the incident with the helicarriers, all of the SHIELD secrets that weren’t personally held by ex-Director Fury are on the internet. Coulson’s plane, however, and their security system?” Peter whistled, impressed. “Best firewall, best digital prtection I’ve ever seen. An almost-impregeneble bubble of security around their systems.”

“Can you get in?” asked Bucky, slightly urgently. 

“I _can_ ,” he replied, sounding a little like he was hedging to the assassin. “But it’ll be awhile. The person who set this stuff up? Incredible.”

“That’ll be Skye,” muttered Bucky. He reached over to a computer and sent her a message. _Skye?_

The girl was an incredible hacker, and thus understood completely how to set up the perfect security system. She had informed him that she greatly admired him (an almost Coulson-over-Steve level obsession) when she was a kid, though, and finding out about the Winter Soldier programming made her cry for days. Bucky was highly touched. Skye had set up a direct link with him, using Tony’s systems. 

Her reply popped up quickly: _What up?_

_Need access to your guys’ files_.

_Why in hell?_

_Steve’s missing._

There was a moment of surprised “silence” from her end, before her reply came: _I’m so sorry, James._

_Peter can’t get in, he says the firewall’s too complicated, or something. He’s the best we’ve got next to Tony, and JARVIS can’t even get a hold on it._

_Good. I designed it that way_. Bucky could almost hear the pride in her voice, if she had been speaking. _Gimme a minute. Coulson’ll kill me, but gimme a minute._

A moment passed, and suddenly Peter cried, “I’m in!” _Thank you, Skye_ , Bucky sent.

_I understand what it’s like to need info on a lost teammate when the supervisors won’t give you anything. Although, at the time it included Ward. >:( Still. Fitz was there, too, and Agent Hand was being cagey. Good luck! :)_

_You better tell me that story sometime._

_Fitz called it the “Sandwich Incident.” Now get moving._

_See ya_. Bucky shut down the moniter and turned to Peter. “Gimme something good.”

“He was going after -- a specific HYDRA base.” Peter looked up, suddenly a little frightened. “It says here that according to our limited records, it was the place you were held. Possibly. At one time, once.”

Bucky stared, thinking. Peter was watching him like he was afraid he’d explode, but Bucky had a one-track mind now. “Why do you think I’m going to freak?” he asked quietly.

“Because...” Peter couldn’t finish his sentence. 

“They moved me around a lot, you know. There wasn’t any _one_ facility. They moved me around many times. I have been in dozens of different places. Only a few of them had the mind-wiping machine, most of them had cryo. I taught Natasha in those places, we were sent on missions. Of course, I figured this out eventually -- they never cut my hair. Judging by it, I was only actually out of cryo for about two years total over seventy years. I don’t _care_ where I was held -- I’ll tear them apart if I can, but first I’m going to find Steve.”

Peter stared at him, and Bucky knew that he was rambling a little, but... It still didn’t matter who had held him, or where. If they were hurting Steve, he’d burn them all to the ground and bathe in their blood.

Well -- the Winter Soldier would. Bucky would carry Steve out and pick up the pieces before cutting down all of his enemies. 

“Were there any other missions like this one?” asked Bucky softly. 

“Quite a few. To many other locations. Steve apparently wants to destroy all the places where you were held, tortured, harmed in any way.” Peter looked up at him, sad. “Coulson agreed because it gets rid of all of the extra HYDRA agents and the dangerous technology they’ve got. They have a few more after this, but at this point, they’re nearly done. I don’t think there’s much more. It’s not like a big secret, like Coulson’s death and revival. Which, by the way, the details are in this system.” Peter made a face. “Dude, it’s pretty gruesome. They basically --” he shuddered, swallowing hard. “It’s --”

Bucky held his hand up. “Just stop, Peter. It’s not gonna help me. You gave me what I wanted to know, now get suited up, and meet me in the quinjet.”

Peter nodded and left, while Bucky downloaded the info on Steve’s missions onto a flashdrive and ran up to the roof to board the quinjet. Everybody, including Peter, was already on board, and as soon as Bucky god on board, Natasha took off. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, got some time to finish this, up it comes! I hope I can upload some more later in the summer, but this'll be the last for awhile. (I know I said that last time, but it's a bit spotty.)


	16. Chapter 16

Steve woke up suddenly, as completely as if someone had shouted in his ear. He frowned, looking around with blurred eyes to see a small, fairly cramped cell. He was sitting, his back against the wall. His wrists were in chains, which were hooked to the wall, and he pulled at them experimentally. Nothing, no ability to remove them from the wall. As if his superstrength had been turned off.

He heard footsteps, and he looked up. 

“Captain Rogers.” 

Steve’s body tensed. That was a German accent. He knew that he’d been near the HYDRA base Coulson had sent him for, but he hadn’t known that he was close enough to be captured. “Who are you?” he asked quietly.

The shadowy sillouhette that was the speaker shrugged. “Nobody.”

“What are you doing here?”

Another shrug. “This and that.”

“What am _I_ doing here?”

“Ooh, an _interesting_ question.” The speaker’s shadow leaned forward. “Your... friend, Sergeant Barnes. He is ours, you know.”

“He is nobody’s,” snarled Steve. “He belongs to nobody but himself.”

“Not even you?” the speaker asked slyly. 

“That’s right,” replied Steve. “Not even me.”

The speaker snorted. “You’re no more than a hostage, Captain Rogers. Although, some of my boys are anxious to try and recreate the supersoldier serum --”

“Them and everybody else,” muttered Steve sarcastically.

“ -- and I’m going to let them use you to figure out how,” the speaker continued as if he hadn’t said a word. “You --” he gestured at the shadows, “ -- can have him first.”

And so began the longest day of Steve’s life -- shunted from one lab to another, his blood drawn until he was sure he had none left, running until he was exhausted and picking up things that made his muscles shake from exertion. He was just grateful not be injected with drugs just yet, or anything else that was overly unpleasant. But by the end of the day, when the first person who had spoken to him had him shoved back into his cell and promised more horrors for the next day, Steve couldn’t help but whisper to himself, “Come on, Bucky...”

As he sat in the dark, chained to a wall so crudely, he couldn’t help wondering if this was how Bucky had felt the first time he was captured, or even in the beginning of the second time -- constantly waiting for something, hoping with every fiber of his being that the only person he could count on to save him would.

If so, Steve thought with a wave of guilt that was physical to the point that it casued him to curl up on himself, then he feared that he had failed miserably on saving Bucky that second time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is short. Long one coming almost immediately!


	17. Chapter 17

Bucky stood tensely, his stomach knotting itself into bundles of tense nerves. His back was to the wall, and the space was very quiet. Nobody spoke except Nat or Bruce about the directions to Chicago, which HYDRA base to go to first. 

“We’re gonna split up,” Bucky spoke up softly. “Nat, you’re with me to the first base, the one he’s most likely at. Bruce and Tony, you’re going to the non-HYDRA hostile base in the area, and Peter, you and Clint are on the other HYDRA facility. Search the whole place, try not to kill if you can help it, but make sure you’re able to shut it down once you’ve ascertained if Steve is there or not. Whether or not you find him, let me know both ways over comm.” He tapped his ear.

Nobody could think of a better idea, so as soon as Tash landed, they split up. Tony and Bruce went one way, Peter and Clint went another, and the two assassins crept towards the nearest base. A surprisingly quiet alarm sounded as soon as they stepped over the border of the premises, and Bucky startled before raising his gun -- just as Natasha shot passed him in a whirl of red hair, leaped over a bush, and brought down the man behind it with her thighs around his neck.

“Nice one,” Bucky commented as Tash nimbly jumped off of the unconscious guard, looking perfectly calm. 

“Stay alert, Barnes” was her only reply.

They moved forward, pushing into the facility and knocking out anybody in their path. _“This one’s abandoned, Bucky,”_ came Peter’s voice in the assassin’s ear.

“Good. Get to Bruce and Tony’s position, see if they need help,” replied Bucky, tensing as they passed beneath ground level. There was a lack of noise, but he was certain that someone, or something, was down here.

A squad of heavily armed men came around the corner and Tash smirked. “I got this, James. That room looks promising -- find your boyfriend!” With that, she launched herself at the group, yelling.

Bucky smiled and ducked through a doorway -- before doubling over, bile in his throat. It was a lab, a testing facility meant for people. Gritting his teeth, he continued through a different door, into a smaller room.

A wave of déjà vú swept over him, and he jumped forward despite it, or perhaps because of it. In front of him was Steve, strapped to a medical bed. Unlike when the supersolider had come to fetch Bucky, Steve wasn’t babbling to himself -- but his eyes were glazed and unfocused as Bucky leaned over him.

“Steve,” whispered Bucky gently. “Hey.” His fingers worked on the straps holding Steve down, but his eyes never left the supersoldier’s face.

Steve’s eyes focused and unfocused, then refocused on Bucky’s face. “Buck?” he asked quietly.

Hooking his flesh arm around Steve’s waist, Bucky hefted the limp man to his feet. “‘Yep,” he said, flashing a sarcastic grin. 

“You came,” murmured the tired soldier, burying his face in Bucky’s shoulder. 

“‘Course I did,” replied Bucky, scoffing slightly that Steve would think he wouldn’t have come.

“I’m sorry -- I didn’t come for you,” said Steve brokenly.

Instead of swallowing bile, Bucky now swallowed a sudden lump in his throat. “Steve, it’s not your fault,” he muttered, leading him out towards Natasha. “Now come on, we need to get out of here.” Addressing his earpiece, he added, “We found Steve. All of you, get your asses and that goddamn quinjet over here. _Now_!”

“Coming, bossy,” grumbled Tony’s voice. “Our facility was completely empty as well, by the way.”

Bucky found Natasha standing in a circle of prostrated, unconscious, half-dead HYDRA operatives. She opened her mouth to say something, but Steve broke in, his eyes already becoming clearer, his speech less slurred: “Buck, this was their plan.”

“What was their plan?” demanded Tash, her eyes suddenly wide, her whole body tense.

Steve stared for moment, then fixed his eyes on Bucky only and said softly, “I wasn’t important to them. I was just...bait.”

“Bait for who?” asked Bucky softly, already knowing the answer and dreading the sound of it anyway.

“You,” whispered Steve.

As if on cue, all the doors on all sides opened and the hallway was suddenly flooded with people, scientists and thugs. Snarling, Bucky shoved a still-weak Steve behind him, removing two pistols from his belt. 

_“LISTEN UP!”_ he shouted, and everyone, including some of the not-so-knocked out guards on the floor, turned to look at him. The look in Tash’s eyes said, _You better have a plan, Barnes_.

The man in front of him had a look on his face that spoke of triumph, insanity -- and not much else.

“Nobody move,” Bucky growled. He shot out his flesh arm and pulled Tash towards him, shoving him behind him to Steve. “Keep him steady,” he muttered to her, indicating Steve. “Now,” he said, louder now. “My name is James Buchanan Barnes, also known as Bucky, but only my friends can call me that. Which you’re not.”

Someone on the floor twitched, and Bucky’s reflexive fingers twitched too, sending a bullet into his shoulder. 

“Must I repeat myself?” asked Bucky, his voice intense and dangerous. “I said nobody move, because if you do, my lifetime and a half of unfortunate reflexes will kick in, and a bullet may lodge itself into something more unpleasant than your shoulder.” 

Not even breath disturbed the air, it was so still. 

“That’s better,” breathed Bucky softly. “I understand from my friend here that this was some elaborate plan to kidap me.” He flicked the muzzle of a gun at the man who was clearly in charge, feeling a rush of savage pleasure when he flinched. “Enlighten me.”

“We are one of the last remnants of HYDRA,” said the man. “We serve the cause.”

“Enlighten me again,” growled Bucky, his whole body tense.

“We thought that to regain you, we would have the ability to kill and slaughter anyone who stood and stands in the way of the original plan.”

“Zola’s plan,” Bucky guessed.

Instead of answering, the man stared at him. “You always did fight so much, in the beginning,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Perhaps it took just your superhero boyfriend to bring your memories back to the surface. That is of no consequence, you know -- this time, we shall simply kill him first and work on rebuilding your demoralized soul later. You did far better when you thought him dead so long ago.”

Bucky’s vision went red, and both of his index fingers contracted. Two bullets plunged into the man, and he crumpled, dead. More bullets sprayed out, downing everybody who was left. 

Bucky dropped the guns, turned, and lifted Steve with an almost angry precision. Tash didn’t even look at him, just led the way out while muttering into her earpiece, “Stark, we’re coming out, you better have that jet ready.”


	18. Chapter 18

Steve blinked himself into a more awake state, finding himself sitting against the wall in the interior of one of Stark’s quinjets. Natasha and Clint were in the front, piloting, and Peter and Bruce were both leaning over hiim in a vague attempt at figuring out whether he was okay. 

Bucky was leaning against the wall to Steve’s right. His body was the picture of tension, although his face was calm, and once he saw Steve looking at him, he relaxed considerably. He smiled. “In case you’re wondering, Tony’s taking care of the facilities. He’ll meet us back in the city.”

Steve waved Bruce and Peter away after a few moments, and they subsided to the other side of the plane, grumbling. Steve looked up into Bucky’s questioning gaze and muttered, “I’m fine.”

Bucky crouched next to him with a soft grunt. He hesitated, then murmured, “Steve, I spent weeks in Zola’s hands and years in the hands of his trained lunatics. Even a day and a half is traumatic and horrible. I know you’re not fine.”

Steve looked away. “I’m _fine_ ,” he insisted.

Bucky’s metal hand found its way into Steve’s right. “Steve, it’s okay --”

“It’s kind of offending,” Steve muttered, and he noticed Bucky freeze, afraid that he’d done something wrong. Giving his hand a gentle squeeze to reassure him, Steve continued, “They weren’t interested in me for anything more than the serum, which is nothing new -- all they wanted was you back.”

“And that offends you?” Bucky asked softly. 

“Well, kinda, in an strange way. I know that I shouldn’t wish that the evil scientists want me, but I still kinda feel like I should be more valuable than that --”

“You are, to me,” Bucky said simply. There was a little bit of silence, and then he added dryly, “And you’re right. You should be beyond glad that the evil scientists have so little interest in you.”

Steve exhaled softly, unprepared for the well of emotions that bubbled to the top of his consciousness when Bucky said that he was valuable to him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okayokayokayokayokay.  
> Ready? Deep breath. *i'mreallyreallysorryiwaitedthislongtouploadi'mnotdeadneitheristhisstoryi'mgoingtoendittonighti'msososorry*  
> also although it may seem egotistical to "need" something like this, i feel it's necessary.  
> again, sorry.  
> also again, this will be finished rapid-fire because i wrote most of this about an hour ago and want it uploaded NOW.
> 
> oh, and sorry this one's short longer ones are coming soooon


	19. Chapter 19

He was woken up by Steve getting up and heaving himself out of the bed. Whining softly, Bucky curled himself tighter into a ball — he didn’t want to get up.

_“Bucky!”_ It was Steve’s desperate, panicked, hoarse voice, and it jolted Bucky right up, although he couldn’t hold back a groan. 

“Yeah, Steve?” he mumbled, coming to a stop at the door to Steve’s closet, rubbing his forehead and directing his gaze towards Steve’s face — which wasn’t there. He froze, and slowly panned his vision down about a foot, to find Steve staring at him with a mix of panic and annoyance.

“We have a problem!” Steve yelped, flapping his arms up and down so that the too-big sleeves of his shirt moved like bird’s wings. 

“I’ll say,” Bucky muttered, staring at Steve with a with a mixture of confusion and disbelief.

Steve was clearly struggling to control his panicked breathing, but it spiralled out of control and he started to cough.

Automatically, Bucky slid around him to the left, rubbing his right hand up and down Steve’s back and gently reminding him to breathe, carefully steering him to sit down on the edge of the bed.

When the asthma attack passed, the two of them were left just staring at each other, vaguely confused. “So…did they do anything similar to maybe… counteracting the effects of the serum?”

Steve shrugged his now extremely skinny and bony shoulders. “I don’t remember a lot.”

Bucky couldn’t help it — he laughed bitterly before awkwardly swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “That’s pretty normal.” He cleared his throat in the silence that followed and said, “Can you try to remember a little?”

Steve shrugged again.

“We should go see Tony.” It was the only logical choice — the scientist would know exactly what to do.

Steve made a face. “I really don’t —”

“And I don’t care,” Bucky replied firmly, standing. “If you don’t follow me, I will _carry_ you,” he added.

Steve’s pride rebelled against that, and he leapt up as if he’d been stung. “Alright,” he grumbled, gesturing towards the door. “Let’s go.”

 

Although it was early, Tony was up and moving around his lab, and he only looked up when Bucky knocked loudly on a table with his metal fist. “What?” he asked, clearly annoyed, swiping his hand in the air to lower his music’s volume. 

Steve stepped out from behind Bucky, and he decided that was a good enough response.

Tony stared for a second, then blinked hard and stared some more. “Barnes, did I go crazy last night? Is Steve really that small?”

“Yes, he is,” Bucky replied, casting a worried glance toward his boyfriend. “And we don’t know why. We were hoping you could help with that.”

Tony stood stock still for another minute, then raced over and started dragging Steve towards a clear part of the floor. “JARVIS, full body scan,” he ordered. “And could you contact Bruce and Peter and get them both down here ASAP?”

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS replied. A wash of blue light scanned up and down Steve’s body, and before it was even done, Peter had come skidding to a stop behind Tony and Bruce was quickly following.

When they had a hologram of Steve’s entire body, they waved him away and he came back and sat next to Bucky. 

One of Bucky’s favorite things was science, even though he’d never admit it. He hated the math part of it, because often he would come to a conclusion scientifically and have to spend hours calculating to prove it, and he would end up being right just based on intuition in the first place. But when it came to instinctive science, especially technology, he loved it. And so one of his favorite things in the world to do was watch a scientist who actually knew what they were doing work. And hopefully, bug the hell out of them.

Back in the war, one of his most enjoyable pastimes was hanging out in Howard’s lab and annoying the hell out of him (although the elder Stark had totally loved it), by watching him work. What Bucky would do was ask really annoying questions every five seconds: “What’s that? What does it do? Does it shoot fire? Does it _fly_? What would happen if I hit that button? Can I have it when you’re done?” However, he did maintain silence when Howard really needed it.

And ever since he’d come to Avengers Tower, he’d hang out in Tony’s lab and do the same thing.

Watching everyone work was funny — the three geeks were surrounding the hologram, occassionally swiping at it to make something visible or to make something else not. Their voices were usually low mutters at each other, but every once in awhile Tony would start shouting in his frustration to make himself understood, resulting in the others shouting back.

Finally, Peter yelled, _“Shut up!”_ When the other two were silent, he highlighted something and expanded it to be the size of a person, revealing a single cell. “Look at this. The protein-synthesis pathway is completely skewed — we have records of what it’s previously looked like, I’ve seen them. Steve’s protein pathways work way faster than this. I think they slowed it down. They must’ve initially changed the entire cellular structure of his entire body, just using his proteins.”

“So how the hell do we fix it?” Tony snapped in response.

“Theoretically, if we could get our hands on what they used to bring about this change, we could reverse it,” Bruce pointed out, swinging his glasses as he thought. “But the issue is, we blew those places up once we left.”

“The only thing I could think of is we recreate Erskine’s original serum,” Peter said softly.

“Everybody’s been trying to do that,” Tony grumbled. “There’s no way _we_ can do it.”

“Or,” Bruce said softly, “we can wait to see if it wears off.”

All three of them turned to look at Bucky and Steve. “We can’t wait,” Bucky growled. “Steve’s got _everything_ back, he’s not just small and skinny — he’s got the asthma, he’s got —”

“Yeah, I have everything that I had when I was a kid,” Steve interrupted. “But I survived and I’ll do it again. I say we wait a week, and if I haven’t gone back to normal, then you guys start figuring stuff out.”

Bucky bit his lip. He could see the look on Steve’s face — there would be no arguing with him, however much he wanted to. And so, reluctantly, he agreed to the plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> toldja.


	20. Chapter 20

The entire week was hell, because after years of being able to breathe properly, going back to not being able to was absolutely horrible. 

Bucky was always there whenever another asthma attack came up, but all Steve could ever focus on when it was silent was how unsteady his heartbeat felt, and how fast. He constantly felt stuffed up, and his head now was consistently pounding because of excess fluids in it. He had _already_ gotten a cold.

So he distracted himself with video games (which he was now terrible at, as his eyesight had deteriorated and his reaction speed was so slow) and loud music. 

The worst night was when Bucky had to leave on a mission.

Steve had spent the last few nights curled up against Bucky’s side, just like the old days, leeching off of his warmth. But now he was off doing who knows what, and to add to Steve’s usual worry, now he couldn’t breathe and was ridiculously cold.

He’d used to think that he’d be absolutely fine having the serum taken away, and in a way he was. He was so sick of people seeing him and thinking _Oh, look, it’s Captain America_. They never saw Steve Rogers. He missed being able to prove himself just by being determined and working to overcome his physical impediments. He felt like he could have been Captain America just fine without the serum.

But at the same time, he’d been able to breathe. He’d been able to be completely healthy. And he was able to fight and protect himself and go on missions (not that he needed to, but it _was_ a nice security to have). And also, he wasn’t constantly cold without Bucky in the bed. 

Although, since Star missed Bucky too and wanted a cuddle-buddy, Steve found that the dog provided a lot of warmth as well.

He didn’t complain — much. Whenever anyone was apparently willing to listen, he’d let himself complain a little, before deciding that he was being stupid and going back to his “toughing-it-out” mode.

For the entire two days that most of the team was gone, Sam came around with enough takeout Chinese for a small army and stacks of DVDs, succeeding in cheering Steve up immensely. At four AM on the couch, having just finished some old movie with crappy special effects that Steve had heartily enjoyed, Sam started looking like he was chewing on something that he was ready to spit out, some sort of confession.

“What’s up, Sam?” Steve asked from where he was comfortably nestled in a den of blankets and popcorn, two empty plates that once held Chinese food balanced on his knees — less than his normal amount, but then, his metabolism was far slower than it had been. 

Sam’s jaw worked and finally he managed to spill out the words, “I — I once…” He trailed off again before clearing his throat and staring straight ahead and saying, very slowly, and very clearly, “I once had a crush on you. When I met you. And it never sat well with me that you didn’t know. And, obviously, this means I’m not straight, which I — I knew before you came along, but I still thought…that you…that _someone_ , you know, should know.”

Steve stared for awhile, then started grinning. “Okay. And you think this is…some sort of issue?”

“Nah, I just…wanted you to know.” Sam started smiling too. He seemed a little surprised, that Steve had taken it well. Which he shouldn’t have been, considering that he and Bucky weren’t exactly discreet.

“What, you think that anybody in this Tower is straight?” Steve demanded, snorting. “Duuude.”

They giggled at nothing for awhile before swiftly falling asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'kay i wasn't intending for the whole sam bit but it just happened so...enjoy?


	21. Chapter 21

Bucky stood with his arms crossed in the lab, listening to Tony rant. He was used to this — spending a large amount of time down here annoying the scientist, he was often used as a sounding-board for ideas (none of which really made any sense unless they were broken down from scientific gobbledegook). Sometimes Tony would just make him stay quiet and would talk for over an hour, mostly talking to himself, but the presence of another person and the illusion of talking to that person making it easier to get the thoughts articulated.

After about ten minutes, Bucky held his hand up. “Tony,” he interrupted, raising his voice to shut the genius up. “Are you telling me that you guys went ahead and and started working on recreating Erskine’s formula?”

“Yes,” Tony replied simply, before continuing, “It took Steve’s blood to figure it out, which we have in vials here, just like the rest of the team. Turns out that the serum bonded with the cell membranes of every single one of Steve’s cells, completely changing their shapes and their —”

“I don’t need the explanation, thanks,” Bucky responded, rolling his eyes. “Here’s the question — _did_ you recreate it?”

“Short answer? Yes.” Tony gestured towards Bruce, who was leaning over a steaming test tube. 

“What’s the long one?” Bucky asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Weeell, it took all of Steve’s blood that we had in storage to make three test tubes’ worth of the serum. Normally that wouldn’t be enough to bring about a completely structure reversal on a cellular level. Now, we examined some of his current blood, took a few samples on the first day, and it turns out that whatever the psychos put in him only shifted his cells a _little_. What I mean is, instead of completely reversing the effects of the original serum, it sort of — _dampened_ them. Hid ‘em.” Tony searched Bucky’s face, looking for signs of comprehension.

Bucky blinked, then said, “So — what you’re saying is, although it shouldn’t be enough, the serum you have _is_ enough. Because the HYDRA hold-overs didn’t erase the effects of the original serum, they just — hid them. So, what, their serum bonded with the last serum to cancel its effects, right? As opposed to the cell membranes themselves. So if that’s the case, then if we can just make this second serum bind with _those_ and either get rid of them or cancel _their_ effects, right?”

Tony stared. “Yeah, something like that,” he said finally, before turning around and walking back towards Bruce. “We should be ready by dinner tonight — let your boyfriend know, will you?”

Bucky grunted affirmative and turned to leave the lab. 

Before he could, Tony’s voice called again: “Hey, Barnes!” Bucky turned to find Tony staring at him with an unreadable expression. “That was pretty damn impressive for someone who claims to know nothing about science.” Then he looked back down at what he was doing. 

Grinning slightly to himself, Bucky wandered off to find Steve.

 

It had been two weeks since Steve had returned to his normal body. They were already out on mission again, in Peru. Tony was running point, and it was only the three of them and Sam, with Clint and Nat still on a medium-length undercover mission in Italy and Bruce called away to a deeply-secret SHIELD lab for consulting.

“Stark, what the hell is going on?” Bucky snarled into his earpiece. “Steve can’t see jackshit from where he is, and from where I am all I can see is goddamn trees. And where the hell is Sam?”

“Calm, Barnes,” came Tony’s voice in reply. “Nobody has entered the building yet.”

“I don’t care whether they’ve _entered_ , I just want to know if they’re _here_.”

“They’re circling to your side of the building,” Tony replied. 

“Thanks for the one piece of useful information you’ve given me so far,” Bucky growled.

“Shut up, the pair of you.” It was Steve’s voice. “Sam is with me. We’re entering the building now.” 

Bucky grumbled to himself, raising his gun to shoulder height and taking aim at the people Stark had been talking about. They were extremely dangerous — at least, the leader of their little group was. He was an extremely wealthy supergenius with too much time on his hands. Kind of like Tony, but not so good at controlling psychopathic urges. The rest of them just had enough money to back his insanity.

“Whenever you’re ready, Barnes.” Tony’s voice was tight and cautious.

They’d been authorized to kill the leader before taking the rest into custody. Which was a tribute to how dangerous this guy was, since Coulson _really_ didn’t like killing people. 

So, of course, Tony’s idea was to give the burden of the murder to the man with plenty of blood on his hands already. 

Bucky forced the thought away and squeezed the trigger.

 

Steve was getting his ass beat. Again.

Bucky swung through a window, shattering it with his feet and landing in front of his boyfriend, standing almost like a human shield and using his metal arm to deflect a bullet. “You’re an idiot!” he called over his shoulder.

He heard Steve’s grin as he replied, “Pot? Kettle?”

“Good point,” Bucky responded, leaping forward and wrapping his legs around someone else’s, bringing them crashing to the ground, where they stayed.

After that there was no room for discussion, because the adversaries came thick and heavy. They fought back to back at first, but it soon became impractical and then they were on separate sides of the room when Steve suddenly cried out, his voice harsh and high-pitched.

_“STEVE!”_

It took a second for Bucky to recognize it as his own voice, it was so hoarse and desperate, and within a half-second he was next to Steve and suddenly he saw red and there was nobody else standing in the room.

He dropped to his knees beside Steve and saw, to his relief, that where he’d been stabbed was protect by three layers of armor. It had barely broken the skin, although it must’ve hurt like hell and knocked the wind out of the supersoldier.

Bucky helped him up before staring at him enough to make him confused, then kissed him deeply. He was dimly aware of Steve’s hand coming up to cup the back of his head, his own hands were on Steve’s neck with his thumbs resting on his cheeks, all he knew was that he was high on adrenaline and jumpy with worry and Steve had looked really, _really_ kissable.

 

Everything was closing around him, it felt like.

The plane was too goddamned small, and he could hear a frustrating ringing in his ears that told a very small rational part of him that he wasn’t breathing right. It covered up the noise around him like TV static, although he caught snatches of panicked voices as he struggled to stand upright.

After awhile, things began to get clearer. In patches, almost like a dirty window being cleaned very, very slowly, layers of film lifting off the glass. 

“Bucky?”

Steve’s voice no longer echoed in his ears, but rather fell on them gently, and Bucky reached out blindly for him, like a drowning man for a piece of driftwood.

When Steve’s solid, warm body was pressed against his, he took a proper breath and buried his face in the other man’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“’M fine,” he grumbled in response. “I just — whenever we killed on these missions, it was because we had to or because we didn’t mean to. I don’t like…I don’t like just setting myself up and killing someone like that. It’s too much — too much like —” His voice broke.

“Like the Winter Soldier,” Steve finished for him softly, releasing him to look at Bucky with concern.

“It’s like — it’s like everything fragments and I can see everything again, the things I did. I mean, it wasn’t me doing them, but — they were my hands,” Bucky whispered, looking down at his shaking, scarred fingers. To him, it seemed almost as if they were dripping blood.

He hadn’t had an attack this bad for months, and they both knew it.

Bucky was taken off mission duty for three weeks until he nearly broke Dum-E in Tony’s lab because he was gesturing too widely, yelling about how he wanted — no, needed — to help, or Steve was going to get his ass beat. One mistake that was never made by anyone running point ever again was that they did not kill from afar, with no provocation.


	22. Chapter 22

It was a comfortable, quiet night in Avengers Tower.

Bucky was munching on popcorn, most of his body propped up on Steve’s chest, which was a comfort to both of them. They were in their room, by themselves, watching the old James Bond movie _Goldfinger_.

Steve had something important to ask Bucky, something he’d been toying with for weeks and weeks that he wasn’t sure how to phrase. He wasn’t sure of the reaction he’d get, for one thing. He knew Bucky loved him, and he knew he loved Bucky, but he still wasn’t sure how this was going to go.

He felt like his heart was in his throat, and the movie was only a superficial distraction. Then it ended.

“Hey, Buck?” Steve asked, swallowing, feeling as if he was going to explode from nerves.

“Yeah, Stevie?” Bucky replied comfortably.

“I…have a question. It’s kinda sudden, and it’s a little — strange, I dunno, but —”

“Quit beatin’ around the bush and ask it,” Bucky responded, sitting up slightly, grinning a little crookedly.

Steve took a deep breath. “What would you say — if I…asked you t-to marry me?”

Bucky stared at him for a minute (in which Steve breathed heavily whilst trying to make it look like he wasn’t) before his grin suddenly widened and he looked at the ceiling, laughing a little. “Well, I think I would say yes,” he said in a mock-serious voice. “Since, you know, I love you and all.”

Steve had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from sighing with relief. “Well. Um.”

“Where’s the ring, doofus?” Bucky asked, now positively giggling.

“It’s — here,” Steve replied, fumbling in his pocket and producing the small box.

“Well, do it properly, then,” Bucky demanded, heaving himself off of Steve and swinging his legs around to sit on the edge of the bed.

Rolling his eyes, Steve pushed himself off the bed and dropped fluidly to one knee in front of Bucky. “Will you, James Buchanan Barnes, take me as your husband?” he asked, except he said it in the most dramatic voice he could recreate, completely with over-the-top hand gestures.

Bucky had to stuff his knuckles in his mouth to keep from busting out laughing. “Yes,” he replied simply, and although they were acting like it was nothing, Steve could only had to look at Bucky’s shining eyes to know that this meant a hell of a lot more to him than he was pretending.

Molding his face into a serious one, Steve busied himself with slipping the simple ring onto Bucky’s finger. They both stared at it, admiring it, before Steve said quietly, “I love you.”

Bucky smiled, and it wasn’t like the goofy one from before. It was softer, quieter, but it still made his eyes crinkle up and he was almost glowing. “I love you, too.”

They laid back on the bed in silence for a little while.

Then Bucky asked, “Why were you so nervous to ask me? Surely you knew what I was gonna say.”

“Well, I thought I did, but I wasn’t sure,” Steve replied slowly. “Neither of us have always been into the whole long-term-commitment thing, although we did agree long ago that we were each other’s exceptions to that rule. But — I dunno. I knew you wouldn’t do something drastic like break up with me, that’d be ridiculous…” He trailed off. The side of Bucky’s face that he could see was creased in thought. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, of course it would,” Bucky said immediately, dispelling all worry. “But the thing is, Steve — it’s true we’ve never really been into commitment, but I thought you knew. You’re the exception to every rule I’ve ever made for myself. Since…since the beginning.”

Steve caught his breath.

“I’ve always loved you, Steve,” Bucky said quietly, looking straight ahead, as if into a different time. “I just — didn’t always know it.”

“I always loved you too, Bucky,” Steve replied with a soft smile. Then it faded. “And then you fell…”

“And then I fell,” Bucky repeated heavily. “But it never got wiped away, how I felt about you. It got buried, a little piled over, but it never left me. And then, whenever I got out of cryo, it was just…it was so weird.

“For…for a long time, I sort of felt, kind of lost. I wandered around in almost a daze, looking for something except I didn’t know what and I was so tired. I tried to reach out, just ask Nat, I really did but I felt _nothing_ , it was like my heart didn’t work anymore. 

“And then I saw you again, and suddenly it was like the world had color again and the lyrics to all the sappy love songs made sense and I could hear birds chirping again. I could _feel_ again. I was…I was so lonely, Steve, but you — with you, I can feel again.”

Bucky’s eyes were shining with unshed tears but he was smiling all the same, and Steve could think of nothing else to do but lean in and kiss him, and they were in a perfect shining bubble of happiness, finally, after so long.

 

_-Yeah, I feel again…feel again_.-

 

_** Fin ** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LAST ONE!!!!  
> sorry-not-sorry for the sappy ending, i needed away to end this so...you're welcome?  
> this was fun! again, i'm suuuuuper sorry for not updating sooner, but is five new chapters and the end of the fic all in one night an okay sorta reward for waiting this long (if anybody cares about this thing anyway)? i hope so.
> 
> ooh, there will be more fics coming, probs not from mcu but for a few...other fandoms. that's all for tonight, folks! hope you liked.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, this is gonna be fun guys.  
> Sorry if I get the characters wrong, this is really just for fun... and to get some of my Bucky and Stucky feels off of my chest.  
> This is gonna change perspective each chapter: first one is obviously Bucky, next one's Cap, and it alternates. :)


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